Tag: Human Resources

America has long boasted of embodying a melting pot of diverse ethnic, racial, and cultural backgrounds. More than ever, professionals are demanding to see this diversity at play in the workplace. So much so that Fortune Magazine recently announced a new metric in ranking its Fortune 500 list: diversity and inclusion. Today, diversity goes a lot further than taking a moral stance. Employees favor diverse organizations, and numerous studies reveal a positive correlation between varying viewpoints and innovation.

What Is Diversity Recruiting?

Diversity recruiting is an active process of seeking out talent from diverse backgrounds. This process involves creating an inclusive talent acquisition process, eliminating barriers preventing equal opportunity during the hiring process, and removing gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, and other biases unrelated to job performance from the recruiting process.

The Basics of Diversity Recruiting

One mistake organizations make when tackling diversity is thinking there is a single solution. While tools like diversity training, bonus programs, and company talks are useful, workplace diversity is an ongoing process. There are some basic principles behind every successful diversity recruiting strategy that are worth taking note of.

Diversity Policies Should Include All People

It’s easy to get hung up on one or two diversity metrics such as under-represented ethnicities and gender. While any progress towards a more inclusive workplace is better than none, such a strategy isn’t genuinely inclusive. The diversity hiring program should account for people of all races, life stages, ages, sexual orientations, educational background, work experience, and ability.

Diversity hiring is also just the first step in creating a more inclusive workplace. Promoting inclusion at every level across the organization should be part and parcel of your drive towards true diversity. It is easier to hire and retain talent when employees can see themselves represented in the various roles across the organization.

Diversity Policies Should Extend to All Activities

Many organizations lose employees in the long haul by focusing only on diversity hiring. These organizations lose talent every few years, eventually leading to a homogenous environment. Such a scenario is counterproductive to the organization’s diversity goals.

Inclusion should be a priority in all organizational efforts and activities. Companies should pay equal attention to recruiting practices, company culture, and development programs. Diversity programs should also apply to the varying stages of an employee’s careers.

Diversity Policies Should Be Measurable

The key to a successful diversity strategy is having hard metrics to track over time. This tracking helps to quantify the process and identify areas of improvement. For this reason, it is crucial to measure employee engagement at different levels to determine if diversity policies are working.

Consider distributing surveys to employees six months after onboarding. By this time, new hires are settled enough to make an accurate assessment of the company culture. This plan of action helps advance your diversity strategy beyond the recruiting and hiring processes.

Anonymous surveys are handy for this purpose. Some employees may be afraid to voice their concerns. These surveys offer great insights into what might make employees feel more included, what needs to be improved, and what the company is doing well to encourage diversity. Tracking success metrics empowers organizations with the information they need to create a more inclusive work environment.

3 Tools to Improve Diversity Recruiting

Here are three tools you can utilize to improve the quality of your diversity recruiting.

1. Create a Diversity Recruiting Strategy

A diversity recruiting strategy will help your organization define goals, action items, accountabilities, and success measures for recruiting diverse talent. Given the rapid change in workforce demographics, a comprehensive diversity recruiting strategy ensures that you honor your commitment to diversity recruiting.

Start by defining three to five goals you want to achieve with your strategy. These may include increasing diversity at every level of the organization, recognizing and rewarding behaviors that encourage diversity, creating a more diverse candidate pool, or creating an Inclusion Advisory Board.

Be sure to measure your goals against job seeker expectations concerning diversity. A diversity strategy that doesn’t meet your employee’s needs may work at counter purposes to your goals.

2. Blind Screening Software

Unconscious bias is a significant concern during the recruitment process. Many hiring personnel are surprised to learn that the process of screening candidates is not objective. It’s impossible to achieve diversity recruitment if the process is flawed from the beginning. Blind screening offers a quick solution to this problem.

Blind screening software hides candidate’s personally identifiable information. This information may include name, race, gender, age, personal interest, and academic qualifications. Hiding this information reduces the chances that such information may trigger unconscious biases.

Workable is a great recruiting software used by more than 20,000 companies worldwide. The software has an anonymized screening feature that obscures a candidate’s name, address, phone number, and other personally identifiable information. The company is also working on more diverse hiring features expected to roll out in the not-so-distant future. Workable also made it to our Top 8 Best Recruiting Software which you can find here.

Workable plans start at $99 per job per month.

3. Social Media

Social media has made it easier than ever to identify and target specific candidates. Notably, LinkedIn hosts millions of groups for almost any profession imaginable. With your diversity goals in hand, it’s easy to determine which professional networks you should be targeting.

Consider the best ways to get your message across to your target groups. Social media is more than just a recruitment tool. It’s also an opportunity to engage with diverse groups in a meaningful way. Consider joining LinkedIn groups with the target demographics such as underrepresented communities, women professionals, or military veterans.

6 Tricks for Improving Your Diversity Recruitment Strategy

Diversity in the workplace comes with many advantages. One study by Deloitte revealed that diverse companies are 1.8 times more likely to be change-ready and 1.7 times more likely to be innovative leaders than less inclusive organizations.

Furthermore, a study by the Boston Consulting Group found that companies with diverse management teams showed 19% higher revenues than their less inclusive counterparts. The advantages of diversity and inclusion in the workplace are hard to dispute. On that note, there is six diversity recruiting best practices worth implementing in your organization.

1. Conduct a Diversity Audit

A diversity audit is a good launching point for providing a 360-degree view of your progress. The audit will help identify areas of improvement and reveal opportunities for creating a more diverse workforce. While you may opt to hire a diversity specialist or diversity consulting firm, this is still a process that can be achieved in-house.

Consider putting together an audit team of employees from different areas of the business. These areas may include upper management, HR, and general staff. Task the team with flagging issues that appear discriminatory. Some of the problems to look out for include:

• Conflicts involving hostile or prejudiced remarks
• Complaints about discriminatory behavior
• Hostility towards programs deemed to be discriminatory
• Disproportionate turnover rates amongst specific employee demographics

It is equally important to collect qualitative and quantitative diversity data. You can then use this data to identify ways to improve internal processes.

2. Integrate Diversity in Your Brand and Work Culture

Many well-meaning organizations are unable to go beyond paying lip service to diversity. According to a Glassdoor survey, 76% of employees and job seekers site diversity as an essential aspect when assessing companies and job offers. With the modern job seeker more discerning than ever, you may come off as insincere or hollow if your organization fails to embody diversity in its brand and work culture.

Your company website is a great place to show your commitment to diversity. Consider including a diversity mission statement, diversity awards, and diversity images on your company website’s Careers Page. The company website is often the first point of contact with potential hires. A transparent show of your diversity initiatives is sure to make a good impression.

Also, be sure to update your company print materials to showcase your diversity. As your diversity strategy takes root, update your workforce demographic statistics, information, and related images.

3. Enhance Your Employee Referral Program

Few people understand what it’s like to work for your organization as your employees. Diverse employees may have strong networks of other diverse individuals worth tapping into. Craft a deliberate message about the importance of referrals and inclusion and the importance you place on diversity. Update your employees on your diversity goals and how far you are in the process of creating a more diverse workforce.

Word of mouth is one of the best and often underutilized recruiting tools. Conversely, consider your current workplace demographics before doubling down on referral hiring. For example, men are more likely to refer other men, and Millennials often have other Millenials dominating their social networks. It may be worth focusing externally if the organization hasn’t yet achieved the desired diversity.

4. Audit Your Job Ads

If you notice a lack of diversity in job applications, it might be that you are inadvertently resonating with a homogenous group of people. For example, the words “ninja” and “rockstar” are increasingly common on job ads. However, these words have masculine connotations, possibly alienating women who otherwise fit your requirements.

Similarly, requiring five years of experience may be alienating younger candidates who are fit for the job. While it’s not productive to eliminate qualification requirements altogether, include only what is necessary for the job. Most hiring managers don’t expect applicants to meet all the requirements 100%. However, steep requirements may be alienating people with different levels of job experience and education.

A simple statement reiterating your commitment to diversity also goes a long way in encouraging diverse talent to apply to the posting. Additionally, be mindful of the places where you source talent. There are plenty of job boards explicitly targeting minorities and underrepresented communities that are worth adding to your outreach.

5. Offer Internships to Targeted Groups

Hiring managers are often frustrated at the lack of diversity in the talent pool. Taking the long-term approach to diversity recruiting helps to build a more diverse talent pool. Consider offering internships and co-op positions to people from specific backgrounds. You can provide upcoming candidates with valuable work experience while opening up the talent pool.

Consider teaming up with schools and community groups in your area to identify prime candidates for these opportunities. Most communities already have such partnerships with organizations. This approach is perfect for your corporate social responsibility (CSR) program. You also benefit from a new and diverse talent pool.

6. Create a Diverse Interview Panel

People tend to gravitate to other people who look like them. Creating a diverse interview panel is an excellent way of ensuring that job candidates see themselves represented in your organization. Also, different interviewers look for something different in candidates. You’ll have a better chance of spotting potential and sourcing diverse talent if the interview panel is varied.

Equally, it’s crucial to build a structured interview process. Ensure that interviewers follow a set of well-defined interview processes where each candidate is assessed on the same criteria. This strict criterion creates a positive candidate experience by leveling the playing field.

Next Steps

Today’s job market is moving towards merging personal and professional life. With calls for equality and diversity becoming increasingly prominent, diversity at the workplace is no longer a nice-to-have. Specifically, the idea of culture fit, a staple in recruiting, is fast becoming outdated. This philosophy is often riddled with bias and prejudice and is worth rethinking going forward.

Finally, a consistent trend in diversity hiring is failing to retain employees for the long haul. Your challenge will be to institute measures to keep diverse talent. Part of this will involve offering much-needed mentorship and support to underrepresented talent. Other possible measures include instituting executive sponsorships and career development programs specifically targeting your diverse talent. Additionally, capture feedback on employee engagement to keep a finger on the pulse of your diversity strategies and programs long-term.

No matter the size of the company, one of the best ways to keep employees happy, loyal, and productive is through a great employee benefits package.

If employees have to jump through a complex series of hoops to gain access to their benefits, or if the benefit records are inaccurate, it’s frustrating for both sides. Having a clear setup process for your benefits program will alleviate this frustration by making sure everything is done correctly during the onboarding process.

Setting up and managing employee benefits programs becomes a far easier process when making use of HR software. The best HR software reduces paperwork and the chance for errors while allowing employees to have up-to-date information as they need it.

Three Benefits of Setting up Employee Benefits

Although it may seem like setting up employee benefits requires a lot of time and effort, it will be time well-spent. Additionally, there are a few benefits to managing the program through HR software, yielding desirable results down the road.

Reducing Chances of Errors

By automating the management of the employee benefits program through software, chances of mistakes diminish. By relying on software, rather than paper documents, fewer errors will occur.

Employees often can track the status of their own benefits through HR software. So should an error occur, the employee will be able to spot it quicker than someone in the HR department. Fixing these errors in a timely manner keeps employees happy and focused on their jobs, rather than worrying about benefits packages.

Saving Time

Setting up a software package to track benefits saves quite a bit of time for those in the company’s HR department.

HR department personnel will not have to manually enter data as frequently, which reduces the time required to manage benefits.

When employees can check on the status of their own benefits, they need less one-on-one help from the HR department. HR personnel won’t be answering all the same questions as often.

With a software package like Gusto, the software handles the termination of benefits when an employee leaves the organization. This saves quite a bit of time for HR personnel, while also ensuring a dismissed employee won’t continue receiving benefits inadvertently.

Adding a Benefit Company-Wide

When the company decides to add a new benefit for employees, such as a dental insurance plan or life insurance, employees appreciate it.

HR software simplifies this process. The software administrator can assign the new benefit to a group or to everyone, rather than going person by person.

Just add the benefit for the entire company, or for certain levels of employees, and the software takes care of the rest.

The Difficult Parts of Setting up Employee Benefits

Even with employee benefits software, setting up the benefits package does take some time. Here are some of the trickier parts of setting up these benefits.

Calculating the Cost of Benefits

Very few companies pay the entire cost of employee benefits. The company may expect the employee to contribute to the cost of health insurance for the employee and any dependents, for example.

It can be difficult to determine the exact amount that the company should make the employee contribute. The company doesn’t want to contribute so much that it becomes difficult to sustain the contribution in the future. Employees become unhappy and frustrated when the company must reduce or suspend benefits.

Along the same lines, making employees contribute an above-average percentage to their own benefits can leave the company uncompetitive in hiring situations.

Gusto can run scenarios for the company, helping to determine just the right amount to require employees to contribute.

Overwhelming HR Responsibilities

A large company may have a dedicated HR department, often with multiple employees. For a small business, though, the person running HR and overseeing the employee benefits programs may also have another job.

With Gusto, this employee will need less time to perform the HR work. This helps this employee dedicate more time for regular duties beyond HR work.

Additionally, the HR software simplifies the management of employee benefits programs. This means the person handling HR and another job doesn’t have to be an HR expert to be able to manage the program.

Helping Employees Understand Their Benefits

Explaining benefits to employees can be time-consuming for the HR department personnel. However, when employees have a better understanding of the benefits they’re receiving and the value, they’ll be happier and more likely to participate.

Within Gusto, administrators can post explanatory documents on the employee dashboard. These documents can explain the benefits for the employees, giving them access to the information whenever they need it. Consequently, employees will have fewer questions for the HR team.

Offering Personalized Benefits

In a growing organization, it’s possible to have employees in widely varying stages of life. Younger employees may not need life insurance benefits. Older employees may want health insurance for their entire families.

If the organization allows employees to pick and choose which benefits they want or the level at which they participate, this can be confusing to track.

HR software like Gusto simplifies the process of setting up a personalized benefits package for each employee.

Ensuring Fulfillment of Required Benefits

Government regulations require companies to offer certain benefits to employees who meet the criteria. Depending on the size of the company, some of these benefits could include:

• Family medical leave
• Health insurance
• Time off for jury duty
• Time off to vote
• Time off for military service

Additionally, employers must pay unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation insurance on behalf of their employees without charging the employees. Employers must match the contributions of the employees for social security taxes and Medicare taxes.

HR software can ensure that the company follows the rules for all of these required benefits, preventing possible violations.

Step 1: View the Employer Dashboard

After signing up for the Gusto HR software, the HR administrator can use the Gusto dashboard. This shows all of the options for setting up and managing the employee benefits plan for the company. (In the examples going forward, we’ll use Gusto specifically to explain how the process works.)

View the Company Information for Benefits

The administrator of the HR benefits package can use the Gusto dashboard to view overall statistics and data regarding the company’s benefits offerings. Some of the information the administrator can view includes:

• Percentage of Employees Enrolled: Through the dashboard, see how many employees participate in various portions of the company’s benefits plan. If one or two benefits have a low percentage of participation, these benefits may need tweaking.
• Estimated Cost: Gusto will calculate the cost to the company for the employee benefits plan each month. It uses the number of employees enrolled and the amount of the company contribution to make the calculation in real time. As participation levels change, the calculation changes too, providing the most accurate information.
• Invoices for Coverage: Gusto provides a means of managing the company’s benefit accounts, including automatic payroll deductions for employees. However, Gusto doesn’t make payments for services for the company. Administrators can use Gusto to view their invoices from a 401(k) plan provider or a health insurance plan provider. But they’ll need to send their payment for the invoices outside of the Gusto interface.
• Corrections for Deductions: If the HR administrator ever notices a mistake in deductions for an employee’s benefits, Gusto allows for corrections. The administrator can spread these correction amounts over multiple payroll periods, so the employee doesn’t have a significant pay drop in any one pay period after the correction.

View the Employee-Facing Information for Benefits

Some of the information an HR administrator can upload to the Gusto dashboard that employees can see and use includes:

• Employee Costs: Companies can give employees the ability to see their projected monthly contributions for benefits. This may include the amount the employee will pay for various levels of health insurance premiums or dental insurance, for example.
• Contribution Percentage: Create a list of contributions that the company will make for employee benefits, so employees can see their remaining responsibility. Contributions the companies may make include a portion of health insurance premiums, a portion of dental insurance premiums, and 401(k) retirement account matching percentages.
• Effective Dates of Coverage: New hires need to understand when their employee benefits kick in, whether that’s immediately upon hiring, after a 30-day waiting period, or after another waiting period.

Upload and Store Documents Related to Benefits

By uploading documents for employees into Gusto, the HR team doesn’t have to answer regular questions about the employee benefits plan.

The HR team also can upload documents directly to an employee’s dashboard that require review and signing. These can include a document for setting up a 401(k) account or for signing up for a health plan, for example.

To upload a document to the employee, start in the People section of Gusto. Click on the employee’s name.

On the employee page, click on Documents. In the upload section, follow the prompts to save the document to the employee’s dashboard. Once the employee completes the document, a notification will appear in the employer dashboard.

Step 2: Set up a Health Plan

One of the most basic benefits employees will expect is a health insurance plan. With Gusto, companies can find a health insurance package that fits the business’ finances and the employees’ needs.

Start a New Health Insurance Plan

When using Gusto, selecting a new health plan is an easy process.

Gusto has put together a collection of several potential health insurance plans that it offers to companies that subscribe to Gusto. (Subscribers can bring their own health insurance plan too, which we’ll discuss next.) Gusto’s available plans will work for companies of significantly varying sizes.

After signing up for a health insurance plan through Gusto, the HR software handles the payroll deduction for the employees. It also can deduct for vision, life, and dental insurance, when the company offers those benefits.

The deductions occur automatically in Gusto, and the HR department can synchronize those deductions with payroll runs. Gusto also handles compliance support for the health plan.

Migrate an Existing Health Plan

For companies that already offer health coverage and that want to start using Gusto, they can move the existing health insurance plan to manage it in Gusto.

At the time the company signs up for Gusto, HR personnel may enter the information about the current health insurance plan. Gusto will handle the process of making the employee payroll deductions and matching them up to payroll run times.

Step 3: Set up a 401(k) Plan

Another popular employee benefits option is a 401(k) retirement plan. It allows employees to contribute part of their paychecks before taxes, building money for retirement. Employers provide matching funds.

Multiple types of investments for 401(k) accounts are available, allowing the employee to match the investment to the appetite for risk.

Start a New 401(k) Plan

Gusto offers 401(k) plans through its partner, Guideline. In this partnership, a company subscribing to Gusto can start a 401(k) plan to offer its employees. Guideline has plans that can fit almost any size of business and the needs of the employees.

Administrators can start the process inside Gusto by clicking the Benefits tab. In the 401(k) section, click on the Offer New Benefits link. Then click Next. Add the desired information before clicking the Get Started button.

Gusto will send the administrator to the Guideline website. The administrator will be able to research and pick from several different options in retirement account plans.

Migrate an Existing 401(k) Plan

For companies that already offer their employees 401(k) retirement savings plans, they can track the plan in Gusto without signing up for a Guideline plan.

Within Gusto, look for the 401(k) section on the Benefits page and click Add. Follow the prompts until the Manage 401(k) with Gusto link appears on the page. Click on it.

Gusto will ask for information about the current plan the company has. Enter the requested information as prompted, including information to have Gusto begin managing automatic payroll deductions.

Step 4: Set up the Employee Dashboard

One advantage of using HR software like Gusto is that employees can handle some of the aspects of managing their employee benefits on their own. Every request doesn’t have to go through the HR department, which saves time.

The HR administrator can determine what types of information appear on the employee dashboard. The administrator controls what changes the employee can make through the dashboard too.

Some of the items the employee may be able to see and control in the dashboard include:

• Health Plan Details: Employees can see information on the health plan deductible, the out-of-pocket maximum cost, any coinsurance due, any copayment due, costs for in-network doctors, costs for out-of-network doctors, and prescription drug costs.
• Documents: When the employer uploads a document for the employee to sign, it’s accessible through the employee dashboard. The employee can submit it back to the employer through the dashboard too.
• 401(k) Account Details: Employees can click on the Benefits tab to view information about an existing 401(k) account, including the account balance.
• 401(k) Contribution: If the company manages its 401(k) account through Gusto and Guideline, employees can make changes to their payroll percentage contributions for the 401(k). They also can adjust the types of investments they’re making.
• Paid Time off: For employees who have paid time off (PTO) benefits or sick leave benefits, they can manage these benefits in the dashboard. They can request a partial or full day off, and they can select multiple days. After submitting the request, the administrator will need to approve or deny the PTO in Gusto.

Congratulations: your new hire has signed the offer letter! Now the real work begins.

Employee onboarding is the final step in the hiring process and one of the biggest keys to retaining this new hire. But it’s where many companies fall short—Gallup research shows that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their employers did a good job of onboarding them.

In this guide, I’ll show you what a good onboarding process looks like. Whether you’re building your onboarding program from scratch or want to formalize a so far ad hoc process, you’ll learn what you need to know to get started.

Let’s start with the basics.

What is Employee Onboarding?

If joining a new company is like tying the knot, then employee onboarding is the honeymoon period.

There’s the practical side of it: getting paperwork in order, necessary equipment ready to go, login credentials, and the new employee up to speed with everything they need to be successful in their role. But just as important is the less tangible stuff: engaging the new hire, setting clear expectations, and getting them acquainted with the business, culture, values, and workforce they just joined.

The goal is to get your new hire operational and comfortable as quickly as possible if you want to lay the foundation for a positive—and lasting—two-way relationship.

The Basics of Employee Onboarding

The core elements of onboarding differ for every company, depending on your policies and operations, but the basic outcomes are the same—to provide your new hire with a platform to:

• Meet their colleagues
• Understand the business
• Understand their role, responsibilities, and how their success will be measured
• Get access to all the resources they need for their work

Here’s what should be included in your onboarding process at a minimum:

Paperwork

As soon as your new hire signs their offer letter, you enter what’s known as the preboarding stage. This is the time between the employee accepting their offer and starting their first day of work. And it’s the best time to get formalities out of the way because the last thing you want to do is bury your employee in paperwork in the first few days on the job.

Many companies use recruiting and onboarding tools to send new hires all the necessary paperwork—including direct deposit enrollment, benefits enrollment, and emergency contact information—before their first day. We’ll get into those tools later.

Welcome

When it comes to your employee’s first day, it’s important to prepare a friendly and memorable welcome. The first day is more about the experience than sharing information. There will be so much information to process that your new hire will likely forget most of it, but they’ll remember how they felt about their first day for the rest of their career.

With the paperwork out of the way, you can use your new hire’s first day as a chance to shape those critical first impressions of your organization. There is no need to plan grand gestures—just nice touches, like a personalized welcome kit at their work station, a team lunch, and an office tour.

There may be more formalities to cover off, too, like presenting essential company info or getting started with other core onboarding elements below. But don’t expect too much from your new hire on day one, as learning a new work environment can be overwhelming.

Tech Setup

Some of this can be done in preboarding, like setting up login credentials, business tools and systems access, and installing all the hardware and software your new hire will need. It’s best to have this arranged and tested well before your employee begins. They shouldn’t have to spend their first day going back and forth with IT.

What would be helpful during this time, though, is tech training. Plan to get them up to speed with your collaboration software, any role-specific software, and basic email and calendar training (if necessary) on their first day.

Initial Meetings

One-on-one meetings are critical for officially welcoming your new hire to the company. At a minimum, you’ll want to have a new hire set up to meet with their manager and/or department leaders in their first few days, to provide a company and department overview, team responsibilities, and a chance for the new hire to ask questions and learn what’s expected of them.

From there, the new hire should start meeting one on one with everyone they’ll be working closely with. It’s good practice for the manager to provide a list of people the new hire should book meetings with and share calendar invites to any monthly meetings, weekly lunches, or daily standups they will be involved in.

Legalities

These are things like wage tax dedication forms, a scan of the employee’s ID (and work permit if necessary), and anything else you weren’t able to do off-site in preboarding. It goes without saying that the legalities are essential, but what I will say is, it’s best to take care of them early on—day one if possible.

Team Social Event

Again, if not on day one, this should happen no later than your employee’s first week. It’s important to balance administrative and social tasks—nobody wants their first few days at work to be all about, well, work.

A team lunch (or another fun social event) is a crucial opportunity to show your company’s human side and for your new hire to get a taste of the company culture. It gives everyone on the team a chance to officially welcome your new hire and get to know each other in a relaxed setting.

End-of-Week Meeting

Lastly, you’ll want to close the onboarding process by giving the new hire a chance to discuss how they’re doing, how well they know their role, whether they feel at home, and their future at the company. It’s also an excellent chance to ask (if you haven’t already) what they thought of their onboarding experience and if they have any suggestions for improvement. Their feedback is critical to continued improvement.

Feedback can happen at any time between the end of your employee’s first month to the end of their first year—you could combine onboarding wrap-up with their first annual performance review, for example. But generally, the sooner, the better.

3 Tools to Improve Employee Onboarding

Automating parts of the process will go a long way in streamlining your new employee’s first few days and weeks. The best onboarding tools not only save time but also create consistent engagement with your new hires from the minute preboarding begins.

It’s the HR department that owns onboarding as a whole, so that’s why you’ll find onboarding tools within general recruiting software, but some provide better onboarding features than others.

Here are three of our favorite recruiting platforms with the best onboarding tools:

Workable

Workable is one of the best recruiting software solutions on the market today, trusted by more than 20,000 organizations. It manages the complete lifecycle of recruitment, including onboarding, with pricing starting at $99 per month for infrequent hiring. You can try it free for 15 days. Even if you don’t buy it, check out Workable’s resources for handy hiring tips, checklists, and templates.

The onboarding features include an applicant tracking system (ATS) to smooth the offer-to-onboarding transition and extensive integrations with other Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) so you can manage hiring end-to-end in one platform.

Bullhorn

Bullhorn specializes in (and is our top pick for) recruiting and onboarding for staffing agencies. It includes applicant tracking and a CRM for managing clients. It also streamlines your clients’ preboarding process with Bullhorn Onboarding, an electronic document management and tracking platform designed to get new hires started quickly.

Bullhorn Onboarding provides a centralized view of your client’s onboarding activities, an online portal and electronic signature capabilities for all their employees’ documents, and secure data storage. This is all built into Bullhorn’s CRM. Pricing isn’t available online, but you can request a free demo.

Greenhouse

A recruiting and onboarding solution for larger organizations (in-house or agency), Greenhouse manages the complete hiring process at scale. In addition to a fully integrated CRM for recruiting, Greenhouse offers onboarding capabilities for a personalized welcome experience, a company resource hub, new hire feedback, onboarding performance evaluations, and more thoughtful features on top of the mandatory administrative tasks.

Again, like many recruiting solutions, pricing isn’t available online. Call Greenhouse for a quote or request a demo.

3 Tricks for Employee Onboarding

In recruiting, it’s all in the planning, and a few small prep items can significantly impact your employees’ onboarding experience. Here are some practical tips you can implement in your company today.

Evaluate Your Current Process

The first step to improving an onboarding program—or lack thereof—is gathering feedback from existing employees on the current process. After all, they know first hand how well it’s working—or not working.

Even if you don’t yet have a formalized process, simply ask what went well during their first few days, weeks, and months and what could have gone better. If you do have a formalized process, ask what can be improved.

Either way, you can start the conversation by sending out a survey or having one-on-one conversations or group brainstorms. As well as asking for general suggestions for improvement, ask specific questions, such as:

• Were you provided accurate information about [company] when you joined?
• Did you feel welcomed on your first day? What could have made you feel more welcome?
• By the end of your first week, did you feel you understood your job overall and what was expected of you?
• What did you enjoy most about your first week here?
• What was the biggest challenge you faced during your first week/month here?

These might be uncomfortable questions to answer openly, so make the survey optionally anonymous and make it clear to employees that you want constructive criticism and that no one will face repercussions for being honest. Follow through on this and ensure no one faces criticism or retaliation if they gave negative feedback.

Map Out Your Onboarding Workflow

Onboarding starts well before your new hire’s first day. There’s a lot to get done, so for efficiency, it helps to plan ahead and map out the workflow from start to finish. This workflow can then be repeated for every new employee like a well-oiled machine.

Start by stepping back and identifying everything that should be included in your onboarding process. Use the employee feedback you collected to help. Think about:

• What (as much as possible) can be done ahead of day one (paperwork, informing team members, prep for day one activities, etc.)
• Everything your new hire should do to start their work (who to meet with, feedback surveys, training, first few projects, etc.)
• What you expect from them in terms of performance with specific, measurable milestones (e.g., completed [insert job function] strategy by [date]

)

Write a list, then figure out the order of things. Pay attention to any tasks that have dependencies, and get input from stakeholders.

This is a valuable exercise even if you already have an onboarding process because it helps you spot opportunities to save time. What tasks can be done concurrently? For example, on day one, maybe you can process the legalities while your new hire is on their office tour.

Use Checklists

So far, we’ve focused on creating a great onboarding experience for your new hire, but a good operational experience for stakeholders is just as imperative. Checklists are great because they add structure and consistency to every onboarding experience and ensure every necessary step gets done.

Because onboarding doesn’t stop at your employee’s first week. A common trap I see companies fall into is putting a lot of effort into that first week and then letting the demands of day-to-day work take over—forgetting to engage the new hire. In reality, onboarding takes a while and, in my experience, always requires more support than you think. Most employees are considered “new” for at least their first 90 days or more until they feel autonomous.

That’s why every company should have what’s known as a 30-60-90 day plan for their new hires: a checklist of everything for their first 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days of employment.

To make one, use your onboarding workflow as a basis. Take tasks from day one onward and arrange them into a manageable number of action items for your employee per week, up until day 90. You can find sample checklists online if you need help. Just make sure the result accurately reflects the job posting your employee applied to, otherwise, the likely result is an unhappy hire.

Yes, the onboarding experience differs for every company, but every good onboarding process is well-structured, so take your time on this. Setting clear expectations can massively improve any onboarding experience for everyone.

What to Do Next

You’ve made it through the hiring process and learned what it takes to start your new hire off on the right foot. Now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and plan an efficient onboarding process.

Start with the tips we outlined above, consider using an onboarding tool to standardize and automate your new process, then evaluate the tools we recommended here (or others in our list of top recruiting software if you want to improve your recruiting as a whole).

When you’re ready to learn how to improve your new onboarding process, another low-hanging fruit is your performance management. This is an important extension of onboarding that, beyond setting employee expectations, evaluates whether they’re meeting them. Check out our rundown of the best performance management tools to digitize that process, too.

Rejecting job candidates is an inevitable part of an HR manager’s role, but it can be an uncomfortable and confronting experience for both the recruiter and the candidate.

For this reason, many recruiters leave the rejection until the very last possible moment, which only creates more disappointment and frustration for rejected candidates.

However, it is possible to soften the blow with unsuccessful candidates, and it all starts with creating a positive candidate experience from the get-go.

Let’s dive into just how you can make rejecting job candidates a more pleasant–or at least a less unpleasant–experience for both parties.

The Easy Parts of Rejecting Job Candidates

Although most will find rejecting job candidates tough at first, when you have a positive hiring process and a clear job description in place, rejecting applicants does become easier. That’s because you have clear-cut guidelines in place that you’ve communicated with the candidates from the get-go.

The key is to treat all applicants with respect, eliminate discrimination, and keep communication lines open. All of which you can achieve with a sophisticated recruiting tool like Workable.

Not only can Workable help to streamline your entire hiring process, but it will also help you to create a positive candidate experience right from the outset. You’ll attract high-level candidates with a branded careers page builder, keep lines of communication open with bulk communications to candidates, and retain their details for future opportunities.

Furthermore, Workable offers a robust knowledge base filled with rejection templates for every recruitment stage, helping you to craft a polite and balance rejection letter to each applicant.

The Difficult Parts of Rejecting Job Candidates

The part that most people struggle with when it comes to rejecting job candidates is letting someone down, especially when a candidate shows great potential but just wasn’t the best candidate for the role.

Another aspect that many recruiters fail to do is to notify candidates of their rejection promptly and with personalization. This is a time-consuming process, but an important one in maintaining a positive candidate experience, regardless of their success applying for the open role.

Finally, many people also struggle with being politely honest when delivering the news of rejection. It’s much easier to sugarcoat things and let the candidate think they have a chance in the future than to honestly and tactfully let them know that they aren’t the right fit for your company.

These parts of the rejection process don’t have to be so challenging. Today, we’re going to give you a rundown of key steps you can take to reject job candidates with grace.

Step 1: Communicate Candidate Rejection Early

Candidates want to hear from you as early as possible, even if it’s to deliver bad news. They may have applied for multiple other roles and are waiting to hear from you before proceeding with other opportunities.

Early-Stage Applicant Rejection

Once your open job role is live, applications will start rolling in straight away. As you go through the applications, you’ll quickly be able to determine which ones are clearly not the right fit for the role. Usually, these applicants will be missing key, non-negotiable skills, or education requirements of the role.

Given that the applicants don’t meet the requirements as stated in the advertised job description, a simple and polite rejection email can be sent out to these applicants even before applications close.

Workable can provide you with an early-stage rejection email template to help you craft the perfect message, which you can then send to unsuccessful candidates via your Workable portal, in bulk.

Be Mindful of Communicated Timelines

Candidates who progress through the interview process will inevitably ask you what the next steps of the process are and when they can expect to hear from you.

Once you’ve communicated these details it’s important to keep in mind that applicants will be eagerly awaiting an update from you around these timelines. With this in mind, it’s important to communicate with rejected candidates as close to these deadlines as possible, to avoid wasting their time or prolonging the process.

Notifying rejected candidates as early as possible that you’re not continuing with the application is a great way to show them you value and respect their time.

As a general rule of thumb, no matter which stage of the recruitment process you’re in, as soon as you know you’re not moving forward with a candidate, it’s time to let them know.

Step 2: Personalize Your Communication

When you’re excited about a new job opportunity and put time and effort into the application process, there is nothing more disappointing than receiving a stale rejection email or cold phone call.

After all, some candidates might be great for the role but have been edged out by another applicant. Instead of burning bridges with these candidates, you need to soften the rejection with a personal touch.

Personalize Your Email

If an applicant is being dismissed in the early stages of the process, or you’ve only ever communicated via email, it’s fine to reject candidates in writing only. But it’s still important to address the candidate by name, rather than “Dear Applicant.”

You should also include personalized feedback in your communication. Highlight why the candidate didn’t make the cut.

For candidates let go in the early stages, it may be that the competition was fierce or they were lacking the non-negotiable experience required to progress.

For candidates who are let go in the later stages, providing more detailed, but constructive feedback relating directly to their interview is key.

If you’re not sure where to start, Workable has tons of fantastic resources to help you find the right words. Here’s an example of a basic post-interview rejection letter provided by Workable.

Pick Up the Phone

If you’ve previously communicated with the candidate over the phone, or they made it to the final round of interviews, it’s important to give them a call to let them know they were unsuccessful.

This will also give you a chance to genuinely thank the candidate for their time and effort throughout the interview process. You can also ask the candidate if they’d like to keep in touch via Social Media or to be invited to future events, in case another position becomes available.

It’s also a good idea to follow up this phone call with an email to cover your tracks in writing.

Adding a personal touch to your communication with rejected candidates regardless of how far they progressed is an important step to creating a positive candidate experience. The better the experience, the more likely they are to apply with your company again in the future.

Step 3: Provide Feedback

Some recruiters will not automatically provide feedback for rejected candidates. While it’s a time-consuming process, tactfully helping candidates to understand why you turned them down is another way to ensure they have a positive experience with your company.

Use Job-Related Criteria

When providing feedback, it’s important to keep the feedback constructive and related to the specific role they’ve applied for. Not only will this help you to communicate the feedback effectively, but it will also help to avoid legal risks and discrimination.

You can also use interview scorecards used during the interview process to help relay specific facts surrounding the candidate’s performance during the interview. Make sure you highlight some things that the candidate did well with their application so that the feedback is not all negative.

Be Clear and Concise

Candidates don’t want a vague explanation as to why they didn’t make the cut. They want constructive feedback and clear advice as to how they can improve for the future. Summarizing your feedback for each candidate into one succinct sentence or paragraph is a great way to ensure you leave the vagueness behind.

Furthermore, be honest with the candidate. If there is no chance of them ever working with you in the future, don’t give them false hope. Wish them all the best and leave it at that.

If you’re not sure how to construct clear and effective feedback, Workable has tons of built-in resources and templates to help you find the right words.

Recommend Skills for Development

If there are certain skills or education opportunities that top candidates could undertake to improve their chances of landing a role with you in the future, tell them! By sharing this information with the candidate, you’ll gain their respect and trust, and help them to improve their job search for the future.

When it comes to providing feedback, as long as your advice is genuine and constructive, candidates will appreciate your help and remember the effort you made to help them improve their application to other jobs. The better that the candidate feels about the application process, the more likely they are to want to stay in contact with you for future opportunities.

Step 4: Ask Candidates for Feedback

Just the same as candidates welcome constructive feedback to aid their professional development, you should welcome feedback from your candidates on the recruitment process.

How you interact with candidates during the recruitment process is critical. Whether the candidate is successful or not, they should still have a great candidate experience and walk away willing to apply for further opportunities in the future.

Create a Candidate Survey

To understand and improve candidate experience, you need to put yourself in the candidates’ shoes. The best way to do this is to create a candidate survey that covers every step of the application process, from submitting their application to receiving the rejection letter.

Workable allows you to create and administer a customized survey to all your candidates. You can even create multiple different surveys to suit candidates who progressed to different stages.

Candidates can return the survey in their own time, while Workable will collect and report the data for you to analyze and make necessary adjustments to the candidate experience.

Ask Candidates Directly

If you’re speaking with a rejected candidate over the phone and feel you’ve built a great rapport with them, you may want to ask for feedback directly.

Constructing a few questions to ask the candidate beforehand is a great way to ensure you receive feedback on key aspects of the hiring process. Keep in mind that the candidate may prefer to provide feedback anonymously, to not hurt their chances of successfully gaining a role at your company in the future.

Whether you collect feedback via a survey or ask candidates directly, asking for feedback shows that you care about the candidates’ opinions and respect what they have to say.

Step 5: Stay In Touch with Unsuccessful Candidates

Ending things on a positive note with unsuccessful candidates is a key step in maintaining a good professional relationship. This step is particularly important if you want to stay in touch with some of the top candidates for future job openings or collaboration opportunities.

By staying in touch with these candidates, you give yourself a pool of talented, passive candidates, for future reference. Just because they weren’t the right fit now, doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future.

Send Monthly Communications with Workable

Workable’s automated bulk email communication is not only reserved for the hiring process. You can also use it to keep in touch with unsuccessful candidates by sending monthly or bi-monthly updates.

Updating candidates on company news or inviting them to industry events is a great way to maintain their interest in working with you. The more you build up your professional relationship with top candidates, the easier it will be to recruit them again in the future.

Use Social Media

Using social media platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook is another great way to stay in touch with past candidates. It allows for better, more personal interaction. For example, instead of receiving a general company update every so often, you can interact with purpose when they land a new job or comment on pieces of work they share.

These interactions will help you to build further trust and rapport with unsuccessful candidates and facilitates the potential for you to recruit them more easily in the future.

There is no avoiding it–the best candidate for your open position is often already employed. And they may not be looking for a new job right now.

Recruiting passive candidates does have more challenges than active candidate recruitment. After all, someone who is satisfied with their job won’t often apply for an open role just for the heck of it. They also don’t spend much time perusing job boards for available opportunities.

But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in a great opportunity.

With the right approach and recruitment software on your side, you can easily source high-quality passive candidates for your company.

Today, we’re going to share with you the key steps you need to take to successfully source and entice passive candidates to apply for your open job.

The Easy Parts of Recruiting Passive Candidates

Most people think that recruiting passive candidates is the hardest part of the recruitment process. But in today’s digital world, finding passive candidates is easier than ever.

There are multiple platforms you can use to put your open job role in front of high-quality applicants, letting them come to you. It’s also easy to create a rewarding employee referral program to tap into your employee’s networks.

If you prefer to contact passive candidates directly, you won’t have to spend hours sifting through potential candidate profiles to pitch on LinkedIn when you enlist the help of AI recruitment tools.

Workable is one of the best recruitment tools out there, especially when sourcing passive candidates.

It automates your sourcing efforts by providing you with a list of 50 best-fit passive candidates every single time you post an open role. It also puts your customized job advertisement in front of passive candidates, wherever they are–including Facebook and Instagram.

Make your recruitment process a breeze with Workable today.

The Difficult Parts of Recruiting Passive Candidates

The biggest challenge involved in recruiting passive candidates is enticing them away from their current position. Passive candidates are already employed. They’re most likely pretty content and engaged with their current role and are being paid well for what they do.

With this in mind, appealing to passive candidates is much harder than appealing to those actively searching for a new job. It’s certainly not impossible, though.

The key to successfully recruiting passive candidates is to entice them to your company with opportunities to grow, more responsibility, and fantastic perks.

Nurturing passive candidates through the recruitment process can also take longer than an active candidate. You have to be careful not to come on too pushy or approach them on the wrong platform. And they may not have time to go through a standard interview process.

However, when you put the right information at the right time in front of a passive candidate, most of these objections can fall away relatively quickly. It’s all in the delivery.

Today, we’re going to give you a step-by-step process to ensure you target suitable passive candidates at the right time to navigate your recruitment process successfully.

Step 1: Clearly Outline Your Objectives

A clear list of requirements is a good starting point for any effective recruitment strategy. But when it comes to recruiting passive candidates, it’s essential.

The last thing you want to be doing is drawing a candidate away from their current employer when they aren’t going to fit your requirements anyway. With this in mind, there are a few things to consider when outlining your objectives.

Outline Candidate Requirements

What experience does the ideal candidate have that your business wants? Are there any non-negotiable requirements that passive candidates should possess for you to approach them? Perhaps there are no essential skills the candidate must show, but general qualities instead.

Think about management or leadership skills and other soft skills that aren’t always listed on resumes and in job descriptions. Are they critical thinkers? Do they have excellent communication skills? You can often find evidence of these skills when reviewing a passive candidate’s LinkedIn profile or other sources.

Knowing exactly what you need from a candidate is the most crucial task in this step, as your answers will affect who you approach.

Review the Role Requirements

Hiring for need is an important part of any recruitment process. But when you are recruiting passive candidates, you have further opportunity to adjust the role within business parameters, to suit the ideal candidate.

Consider whether any aspects of the role could be accentuated and or removed to make the position more appealing to the candidate. Align these considerations with your business objectives to ensure your key requirements will still be met.

Know What You’re Offering

A passive candidate is already comfortably employed. They’re not necessarily searching for a new position. This means that knowing all the perks, benefits, and opportunities you can offer a new candidate is a vital part of the recruitment process.

You should emphasize growth potential and showcase company culture to entice the candidate to join you. You can also encourage employee advocacy to increase the chances of your company’s culture being well-known. If your company offers anything above and beyond, such as fully subsidized insurance plans or higher-than-average commission structures, the potential candidates should know about them.

There needs to be clear motivation in place for passive candidates to consider leaving their current position.

You must take the time to outline your thoughts and objectives on each of the above before you approach passive candidates. This will ensure you go in with clear communication and integrity, inspiring confidence in a potential candidate.

Step 2: Invest in Workable

Modern recruiting is made much easier with the help of comprehensive recruitment software. Enlisting the help of a good recruiting tool can help automate processes such as sourcing and attracting candidates, evaluating the applicants, and even hiring them.

There are tons of great recruitment tools available, but Workable is one of the best to recruit passive candidates.

Automatically Source Passive Candidates

Workable hosts 85 million candidates in 1.3 million jobs and then leverages this knowledge to make your passive recruitment a walk in the park.

Using AI Recruiter technology, Workable provides you a list of 50 best-fit passive candidates every time you post a job. It links keywords in your job description with key phrases in candidates’ online profiles to highlight them as good matches.

The great part is that this feature is a standard inclusion on every plan.

Show Up Where Passive Candidates Are

Passive recruitment requires out-of-the-box thinking regarding getting your open job role in front of as many people as possible. After all, passive candidates are not sifting through job boards looking for their perfect job and applying to open roles.

Instead, you need to enlist the help of social media advertising. Workable will find your audience and customize your ads, helping you to put your open job role in front of passive candidates, where they are. This includes their Instagram stories and Facebook feeds.

Workable promises to find you 10 to 20 qualified applicants in just one week of posting these targeted ad campaigns.

Don’t spend hours manually searching for top-level passive candidates or scratching your head over which social media platform to share your open job role on. Let Workable cover that for you, leaving you time to focus on enticing the candidate to join your company.

Step 3: Tap Into Your Network

Often, you can find an ideal candidate within your existing network. Referrals are a great recruiting source, especially for passive candidates.

Establish a Referral Program

Every one of your employees has their own network full of personal connections. And these connections are usually filled with high-quality passive candidates. Establishing an employee referral program is a great way to incentivize your employees to recruit new talent.

Workable’s engaging employee referral platform makes it easy for your employees to refer their friends, ex-colleagues, and connections. It will notify your employees when an opening is available, and each employee will receive a unique sharing link.

Employees can also track their referrals and review any rewards you offer in return for successful hires. Rewards could be monetary, extra vacation days, gift cards, and more.

Revisit Previous Applicants

Rejected candidates from the past can make great candidates in the future. Workable’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS) allows you to revisit an abundance of candidate profiles when searching for new talent.

Just because these candidates were rejected by your company previously doesn’t mean that they’re not still interested in an opportunity to join the company. They simply may not have been the right fit for that particular position. Some candidates may have even been rejected in the final stage of the hiring process.

In the meantime, it’s likely they’ve found new jobs, gained further skills and experience, and would now make a fantastic addition to your team. Or perhaps they are simply better suited to the new position you have available than the one they originally applied to.

Step 4: Recruit with Caution

Passive candidates aren’t looking for a job, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in new opportunities. However, their lack of actively searching for a job does mean you need to handle communication with a little more caution.

Approach Passive Candidates Carefully

If you plan to contact passive candidates directly, you need to be careful in your method of approach. For example, most professionals who use LinkedIn to stay connected with their network are already used to recruiters approaching with new job opportunities.

But when you start approaching passive candidates on more personal platforms such as Facebook or Instagram, it may come across as weird or intrusive for the candidate.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t use these platforms. You just need to be careful in the way you craft your message. Honesty and simplicity are vital to winning passive candidates over.

If you’re not getting a response, it’s likely that they’re not interested and just don’t know how to tell you. As a rule of thumb, reaching out three times is a good maximum guideline before moving on to another candidate.

Send Personalized Sourcing Emails

If you were content with your job role and received a bulk sourcing email from a recruiter, would you reply? Not likely.

The best way to draw in passive candidates is to earn their trust and pique their interest with a personalized email, not a mass message or template.

Crafting a personalized email naturally takes more time, but it can be used to address key talking points. These may include what drew you to the candidate’s profile and what impressed you about their accomplishments. If it is a previously rejected candidate, take the time to explain why you think this new role could be a better fit for them.

Make sure to include some details of what you’re offering. Don’t go too overboard. Keep it short and sweet and give them just enough detail to start a discussion.

Sell Yourself

Just because you’re approaching candidates with caution and keeping things concise doesn’t mean you can’t sell yourself. To grab candidates’ attention right off the bat, it’s a good idea to include the details that most candidates want to know first.

Highlight the company’s culture and values. Drop notable perks and benefits that come with being a part of your company. Mention the office location and whether remote work is an option. Talk about the higher compensation if you know about what they are making now.

Remember that you’re enticing the candidate away from a comfortable role. It’s important to make sure you don’t sell yourself short in an effort not to appear overbearing.

Step 5: Hiring Passive Candidates

With all the passive recruitment methods mentioned above, it’s likely you’ve successfully attracted talented passive candidates. But until you have signed paperwork on your desk, you still need to nurture these candidates throughout the hiring process.

Offer Flexible Interviewing

One of the main objections passive candidates have in applying for a new role is that they don’t have time to go through the interview process. It’s unlikely they want to share their movements with their current employer, so taking multiple days off to meet with you is not possible.

Instead, offer candidates a flexible interview process. Modern technology means there are several ways you can meet with your candidate virtually at any time.

Workable supports integration with the most popular live, two-way video apps, including Google Hangouts and Zoom, meaning you can continue using Workable to support the recruitment process.

Eventually, you’ll need to meet the candidate in person. By this stage, the candidate will have a good idea of whether or not they want to join your organization.

Setting a Start Date

When hiring passive candidates, the final thing to consider is that their start date will be dictated by how much notice they need to give their existing employer. Depending on the extent of their relationship with the employer and whether they’re working on particular projects, the notice period may be drawn out further than the usual two weeks.

It’s important to keep this in mind when you start the recruitment process if you’re looking to fill the position swiftly. Be open and honest with the candidate about the ideal start date. They may be completely open to it and excited to get started with your company as soon as possible. But if possible, be flexible with their start date to accommodate their needs when leaving their current position.

Reference check questions, as mundane as they might seem at first glance, can ultimately help you avoid a terrible contract or a bad hire. Taking the time to follow through by asking the right questions is one step toward a better hiring outcome.

It can be hard to know what questions to ask because a lot of it depends on context and experience. In this guide, we walk through the basics of asking good reference questions, the tools you can use to improve your reference checks, and ways to ask better questions regardless of who you’re talking to. Let’s start with the basics.

What Are Reference Check Questions?

Put simply, once a job-seeking candidate hands you a list of professional or personal contacts, you can reach out to those people to ask questions that’ll give you less biased information about that candidate. The better reference questions you ask, the better insight you’re able to gather about your job candidate. This way, you’re able to make the right choice when you’re trying to decide who is the best fit for the job.

The Basics of Reference Check Questions

Once you break down reference questions into a few key components, you’ll be able to run a successful reference check for any potential hire. Here are some considerations to note as you prepare to run reference checks:

Clear Consent

Before you pick up the phone and start contacting anyone, it’s good practice to ensure your potential hire knows you are reaching out to their references.

You can do this in a variety of ways. You can contact the candidate directly by phone or email to let them know you’ll be reaching out to their references within the next few days. Or you can include a spot in your job application asking for explicit permission to contact all references a job seeker provides.

Making sure you have explicit consent to run a reference check on the candidate ensures you’re both on the same page and clearly communicating throughout the hiring process. Getting clear consent first helps you avoid any possible misunderstandings. This leads us to confidentiality, an important part of the reference check process.

Confidentiality

One of the best ways to get the most out of your references is to let them know that any information they share with you is strictly confidential—meaning you don’t plan on sharing their answers with anyone.

This puts the person at ease and allows them to share more candid details that are less biased. This, in turn, gives you a clearer picture of what it would be like to hire and work with the candidate you’re considering.

If this is your first time running a formal reference check, it can seem overwhelming at first. But you can make the process easier on yourself by first doing your due diligence and preparing beforehand.

Due Diligence and Preparation

Doing a little prep work before any reference check, even if it’s just a few minutes of gathering notes and jotting down key questions, can mark the difference between a successful reference check and a useless one.

Doing your due diligence and preparing well before running a series of reference checks for a list of job candidates can be tedious, depending on your industry. While some reference checks are more straightforward, others take a little more work, especially if you’re trying to fill a high-level position with a lot on the line that requires a specific set of skills you need to verify beforehand.

Here’s where reference check software can come into play as a total game-changer for your reference check process. Below, we dive deeper into a few options you can try on for size to make the reference check process a breeze.

5 Tools to Improve Your Reference Check Questions

When it comes to making the hiring process more straightforward, reference check software can help you get the job done. Here’s a look at some of the best software you can use.

SkillSurvey Reference

Say you’re thinking about hiring a candidate that so far seems like a great fit, but you still need to follow through and check their references. With SkillSurvey Reference, you get access to reference questions that have been proven to predict hiring success. If you don’t want to create your own reference questions from scratch, SkillSurvey Reference provides a massive list to choose from to design a set of reference questions appropriate for your industry.

In a nutshell, SkillSurvey Reference combines data and reference questions designed by people with experience in the field to provide you with a faster and more accurate reference check process. Though SkillSurvey Reference doesn’t publicly list prices, you can request a live demo to learn more.

Vitay

Vitay combines ease and automation to provide HR leaders and recruiters with a framework for a better reference check process to increase your employee retention rate. Once you request a set of references from your job candidate through Vitay, it automatically reaches out to each contact with a set of questions you design.

The process of sending an email to references with a quick reference check questionnaire they can quickly fill out and send back can cut the time you spend collecting insight on your job candidates in half. Its prices start at $299 a month. Check out Vitay here.

HiPeople

HiPeople is designed to help you collect candidate reference check information at scale. Through the HiPeople dashboard, you start by choosing what you need to learn about the candidate.

From there, once you feed it the reference information you have on hand, HiPeople goes to work to gather the reference information you need to make smarter hiring decisions. Though HiPeople doesn’t outright list its prices, you can request a demo to learn more here.

Checkmate

Checkmate brings together the reference checking and screening process for a smoother pre-screening workflow. In a nutshell, it’s designed to cut reference check admin time in half while helping you get the most out of your screening and reference process.

Once you choose the questionnaire to send your candidate, Checkmate does the rest while you wait for a response. The information your candidate provides is used by Checkmate to send personalized reference checks to the contacts provided.

With less time than it would take you to run a reference check manually, you’ll be able to see your job candidate with a new lens. Checkmate does all of this at a cost-effective price, with prices starting at $17 per check. You can go here to learn more and sign up.

Xref

Xref also uses automation to help you run a reference check to help speed up the process. It’s designed to help you collect references to send your questions and get them back within an average of 24 hours. If something goes wrong through the reference check or Xref gets their hands on unusual reference check information, its data-driven algorithm gives you a heads up, so you’re making informed hiring decisions.

Xref works on a bespoke pricing model. You’ll have to get in contact with them here to learn more about how much it’ll cost you to use it.

3 Tricks for Asking Better Reference Check Questions

We’ve gone over what reference questions are, their key components, and what tools you can use to make the process easier. Here are three additional pointers to help you run better, more effective reference checks.

Ask Open-Ended Questions When Possible

Without a doubt, open-ended questions help you get the most value out of your references because they encourage the person to provide more in-depth and thorough answers about the candidate.

A closed (yes-or-no) question is: “Was (candidate) a good worker?” A more open-ended question would be: “How would you describe (candidate)’s day-to-day job performance?”

Any open-ended question will give you a better picture of what employing the candidate will likely be like. Here is a brief list of common open-ended questions you can ask or use to inspire your own set of questions:

• Could you describe your relationship with (candidate)? In what capacity did you work with them?
• What were (candidate)’s most significant accomplishments during their time with you?
• Could you tell me a bit about where (candidate) fell short in terms of job responsibilities or skills?
• Would you be able to share information about why (candidate) left your company?
• If you had to name two to three of (candidate)’s biggest strengths, what would you say they are?
• Could you describe (candidate)’s relationship with their co-workers?
• What would you say are some areas of improvement for (candidate)?
• What dates did (candidate) work at your company?
• What, if any, unusual or disruptive behavior did (candidate) display during their employment with you?

You can use this list to get started creating a reference process to make the best hiring decision. While you don’t have to ask every single question that comes to mind, it’s essential to know which are the most important ones to garner you the best information.

Be Aware of What You Can Legally Ask

It’s illegal to ask your references about a candidate’s personal information. This includes any questions about religious background, age, parental or marital status, disabilities, gender identity, or nationality. In other words, you should never ask a reference any questions that have anything to do with protected class information.

Need a few examples? Here’s a short list of questions to never ask during your reference check process:

• Does (candidate) have children/did they ever need to use parental leave days?
• Was (candidate) ever absent from work due to religious reasons?
• Did (candidate)’s age ever get in the way of successfully performing their job duties?

Though these questions might sound fairly innocuous at first glance, they’re actually in violation of the protected status laws that are put in place so that job candidates don’t get discriminated against during any part of the hiring process. As you create your reference questions, it’s important to steer clear of any questions that might violate hiring laws. You can learn more about it here.

Take Detailed Notes

When listening to answers from references, it’s easy to think you’ll remember it all once you need to refer back to it. But it’s easier to forget than you might think—especially if you’re running several reference checks at a time.

You should take detailed notes during the conversation. That way, you’ll be able to refer back to accurate information not tarnished by a faulty memory. Notes also make it easier to share your findings with any stakeholders involved in the hiring process.

What to Do Next

If you’ve gotten this far, you know how to ask effective reference questions, what to watch out for, and the tools you can use to make the entire process easier. From here, there are a couple of things you can do to reinforce your reference check process.

If you’re looking for tools to streamline your recruiting process, this guide walks you through how to choose one that’ll work for you. For an in-depth review of the best HR tools, check out the QuickSprout guide to HR software. Need to reference this guide later? Make sure to bookmark it.

Recruiting new talent and conducting job interviews can be a daunting task for those without experience. The recruitment process takes time, energy, and a lot of administrative work, and conducting the interview itself can feel just as nerve-wracking for you as for your applicants.

But the process doesn’t have to be so daunting or arduous. With the help of the right recruitment software and some interview preparation, you can recruit top-level talent and conduct killer job interviews relatively stress-free.

So if you want to conduct a smooth-sailing job interview, stick with us, as we tell you exactly how to do it.

The Easy Parts of Conducting a Job Interview

Even if you’re not a particularly social person, the easiest part of conducting a job interview is that you have common ground with the applicant–you already work for your company, and they want to. That gives you a good starting point.

You get to share your passion for your line of work, the company’s goals and values, and paint an ideal picture of the job role to new candidates. Furthermore, you get to be a part of shaping the future of the company by choosing which candidate brings the most to the table.

Recruitment can be an arduous process at times, but with the right tools it doesn’t need to be. Breezy HR is an end-to-end recruiting solution designed to help you attract and hire top-level talent efficiently and stress-free. Breezy HR provides you all the tools you need to recruit, organize, and keep in touch with all your candidates.

The Difficult Parts of Conducting a Job Interview

When it comes to conducting a successful job interview, preparation is key, particularly when it comes to formal interviews with a multi-step process. Planning things like the structure of the interview, the questions you’ll ask, and how you’ll grade each candidate may seem like a fruitless task, but it will make the entire process much smoother and more successful.

Having a clear plan in place will also help to prevent inconsistencies across interviews from appearing. It’s extremely common for interviewers to let personal biases, moods, or distractions, get in the way of the impression the candidate has made. Ensuring you have a streamlined scoring system to mark candidates the same across the board will help combat these biases.

Finally, one of the most challenging parts of conducting interviews is interview fatigue. Arranging all your interviews in one day may seem like a great way to speed up the hiring process. But can you honestly say that if you were to set back-to-back interviews over an entire day, you’d give the last candidate the same attention level as the first? Of course not, none of us would.

To combat interview fatigue, schedule no more than four interviews per day. Be sure to allow for regular breaks between interviews, giving yourself enough time to jot down immediate thoughts, before moving on to the next candidate.

Step 1: Get Organized

All of the easy and difficult parts of conducting interviews we discussed above, can easily be controlled or prevented with some preparation and organization in place. With this in mind, we start first with planning.

Hire for Need

Before you start the recruitment process, a key step is to determine whether your recruiting position is a true business need for your company. Or if the position you’re recruiting for can be improved or changed in any way to further suit business requirements.

Take this opportunity to dig deep into what it is you’ll need the new candidate to do and structure the position accordingly.

Determine the Process

It’s important to determine whether the interview process will consist of one or multiple components before you create the job advertisement and start recruiting. Many candidates like to understand the entire interview process before diving into a job application.

In this step, consider things like whether you’ll set a task for candidates to prove their capabilities, as well as if you’ll hold a phone interview first to narrow down the list of face-to-face interviews. Also consider whether you need to involve other people in the process such as high-level managers or stakeholders, and weave this into the process too.

Know What You’re Offering

Aside from having the opportunity to land the job of their dreams, most candidates also like to know what kind of perks they’ll see alongside the position. It’s a great idea to include these perks in the job description to entice quality candidates to apply.

This step is all about dialing in on what your company has to offer new candidates. It should cover things like expected salary, bonuses, career development opportunities, included perks, or benefits employees will be entitled to after their probationary period.

Covering the tasks of this first step is important as it allows you to fine-tune the requirements of your business. You’ll also get to plan what the ideal hiring process looks like and to define the scope of your offer, before diving into the recruitment stage.

Step 2: Start the Recruitment Process

Now that you have all your ducks in a row, it’s time to start the recruitment process. The length of the recruitment process can be as short or long as you need. But if you focus on including the below steps, the process will be a smooth one.

Enlist a Recruitment Software

Instead of manually posting the position and managing your recruitment across multiple platforms such as Indeed, Glassdoor, or GoogleJobs, you can do this all in one place with a tool like Breezy HR.

With Breezy HR, you can create custom pipelines for different positions and tailor the hiring stages to fit the needs of each role. You can also broadcast your open role to the best job sites out there, without manually uploading to each site. You’ll even be able to schedule interviews within the software, allowing candidates to select a time that works for them.

Breezy HR will take care of the mundane, administrative tasks of recruiting, allowing you to focus your energies on choosing the best candidate for the job.

Craft the Job Advertisement

After taking the time to dial in on what your business needs are and what you can offer interested candidates in Step 1, you’re now ready to craft a killer job advertisement.

This step is important as you need to be clear with candidates on what skills they should possess, while also pitching the role in a way that entices top-level candidates to apply.

Include an in-depth description of the role including key tasks and responsibilities. You also need to set clear guidelines for candidates in terms of what previous experience or skills they should have, and what you can offer in return. Finally, let candidates know what they need to do to apply and when applications close.

Advertise on Multiple Platforms Using Breezy HR

When your perfectly crafted job advertisement is ready to go, share your open job role with thousands of applicants. Breezy HR will automatically distribute your job description to free job boards relevant to your area, and your role, with the click of a button.

With another click and an additional fee, Breezy HR will also share your open job role to premium job boards such as LinkedIn, Seek, and ZipRecruiter.

Step 3: Preparing For the Interview

You’ve launched your killer job advertisement onto all the best job boards and now applications from incredible candidates are flowing in. It’s time to prepare for the interview stage. Here is where the important steps towards preparing and executing the perfect interview begin.

Plan Interview Structure

You should already have decided on the components of the interview in Step 1, but now it’s time to plan the structure of each component. It’s a great idea to draw a rough outline of how the interview will ultimately unfold so that you don’t get sidetracked along the way.

Consider things like how you’ll start the interview, what kind of questions you’ll ask and when, and how much time you’ll need to conduct the interview.

Create an Interview Assessment Guide

Using an interview assessment guide to grade each candidate is important in ensuring that all candidates are compared equally and without bias. It also means that you can use multiple interviewers throughout the process, with peace of mind that they are all looking for the same qualities in a candidate.

In your assessment guide, include details of the key skills candidates must possess, a method of how interviewers should grade candidates’ responses to certain questions, and what skills or behaviors they should exhibit when attempting any physical components of the interview.

Prepare Interview Questions

Preparing which questions you’ll ask each candidate is a great way to ensure you’re covering all aspects of the interview assessment guide you’ve just created. You can also pass these questions to any other interviewers so each candidate has a similar interview.

Include topics such as previous employment experience, skills or education that candidates can bring to the role, and questions relating specifically to the open role. Don’t make these questions so hard that they can completely stump or embarrass the candidate. You want them to feel comfortable and capable to perform their absolute best in the interview.

Schedule a Date

Ideally, you’ll be covering all these steps while the recruitment stage is ongoing, so by the time applications close, you’re ready to hit the ground running with interviews. Leave yourself at least one week after the application deadline to go through applications and notify successful candidates of the interview date and time.

Furthermore, when setting the interview dates and times, remember to schedule a maximum of three to four interviews per day and allow for plenty of time between interviews to make notes on immediate thoughts and to let go of any negative emotions before you greet the next candidate.

Taking the time to adequately prepare for the interview process is almost more important than holding them. Here you have the opportunity to construct the ideal interview that is going to make the interviewer confident and the interviewee comfortable and capable of showing their true talents.

Step 4: Conducting the Interviews

If you’ve put in the work using the steps above, conducting the interview will be the easiest step in the whole process. Here are some pointers to make sure all your hard work comes to life when it comes to the live interview.

Start With Casual Conversation

Instead of diving right into the job-specific questions, take some time to get to know the candidate. Start by introducing yourself and ask a few easy questions like “how’s your day going so far?” or “do you live in the area?” Feel free to follow up on these with a bit of small talk to get to know the candidate more.

Asking these questions will allow the candidate to relax and feel comfortable with the interviewer before diving into the interview questions. The aim here is for the candidate to open up and share their true colors throughout the interview.

Introduce the Company

Once everyone has relaxed, it’s time to give the candidate a rundown of the company. Ideally, they’ll have done their research into what the company does, but it always helps to hear it from an insider’s perspective as well.

Include specifics of your role, your position in the business, and how the company sees itself positioned compared to competitors. Finally, touch on what the candidate can expect from the business in the future if they are to be successful.

Dive Into the Questioning

There are two parts to the questioning portion of an interview. The first part involves general questions about the candidate’s experiences and skills, career goals, or future plans. This is a good opportunity to refer to the candidate’s CV and ask pointed questions about what you see.

The second part involves specific position-based questions allowing you to discover how the candidate thinks they will put their skills into practice within your business. Ask questions about how they’ll handle particular parts of the job and whether they have previous experience handling similar situations.

The question portion of the interview is also a great opportunity for candidates to glean information from you too and can turn your interview into more of a conversation which is ideal for discovering the candidate’s true personality.

Allow Time for Candidate Questions

When you feel you’ve covered all aspects of the interview, don’t forget to allow the candidate the opportunity to ask you questions. This is a great way to determine whether they’ve done their research or are truly interested in the role.

An interested candidate is likely to ask questions like why the position is open, when the expected start date is, and when they can expect to hear from you again.

Don’t forget to share this information with the candidate regardless of whether they ask. It’s important to set guidelines as to when they’ll be notified of the outcome of their application.

Step 5: Hire the Best Candidate

This step may not come right away if you plan to do second and third rounds of interviews. If you are going to do this, repeat step 4 for each round of interviews until you reach the final stage.

Compare Candidates

Bring together the interview assessment guide, any additional notes you’ve taken, the candidate’s CV and job application, and get ready to compare the candidate’s side-by-side.

Ideally, you’ll also have some input from your colleagues in this step, which you can also do within Breezy HR. Having a second or third opinion on a candidate’s performance can help to weed out any bias or favoritism you may be accidentally projecting into the process.

Complete Reference Checks

Once you’ve chosen your preferred candidate, contact their references to ensure that they are as good as they present themselves. This is an important step as some candidates will shine on paper, but stumble in the interview and vice versa.

The candidate’s references will be able to provide first-hand information relating to their on-the-job performance which is obviously vital to their success in the position.

Issue the Job Offer

Once you’re satisfied you’ve chosen the best candidate and completed all your checks, it’s time to deliver the exciting news! Issue the formal job offer, contract, and arrange a start date with your preferred candidate.

Ideally, you’ll wait until you receive the signed and accepted job offer before notifying the other candidates that they’ve been unsuccessful. Although it’s an uncomfortable step, letting them know why they weren’t successful or what the successful candidate could offer that they didn’t, is great feedback to provide, so they can address these skills for future employment opportunities.

Bad hires are every company’s worst nightmare.

Not only do they waste the company’s resources but also jeopardize the safety of employees and customers.

To borrow from an old saying, “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.”

Unfortunately, these bad apples escape most hiring professionals’ scrutiny by lying on their resumes. A better way to weed out these wrong candidates is to perform background checks that will comb through each applicant’s history as a true detective would.

The Easy Parts of Doing Background Check

You don’t have to go all-out when doing background checks.

If you’re only screening candidates applying for entry-level positions, you don’t need to conduct all background checks right off the bat. Similarly, if you’re at the initial stage of the screening process to filter out multiple candidates, paying for comprehensive background reports may not be practical at all.

In both instances, simple identity verification is enough. Unlike other more complicated reports, identity verification can provide background check results almost instantly or within the day. All you need is the applicant’s name, social security number, and birth date and the third-party provider can return valuable results for you.

Intelius is a leading provider that can run unlimited background checks for a fixed monthly fee. The basic background checks it provides offer insights into a person’s employment, education, criminal records, marriage, and any lawsuits, bankruptcies, or liens associated with his name.

The reports are limited but enough to whittle down your candidates before you move on to comprehensive yet more time-consuming reports.

The Difficult Parts of Doing Background Check

Background checks are covered by federal, state, and county laws that oftentimes overlap with each other.

It becomes more complicated when the company hires across multiple locations where laws are applied differently. For example, while one state prohibits access to certain criminal records, another state only limits when and how such records are accessed.

One way to get out of this legal limbo is to make sure the company follows a written background check policy from the get-go. This set of guidelines can be created with the help of in-house legal counsel to ensure consistency in conducting background checks, all while ensuring compliance with existing laws.

If you’re screening applicants from multiple states, there are also third-party background check providers like GoodHire that can simplify the process for you. GoodHire has a built-in adverse reaction workflow which simply means it can automatically recognize the company’s location and the applicant’s location. Based on this information, it identifies overlapping rules and then implements the strictest rule that applies to all jurisdictions.

Step 1: Create a Background Check Policy

Arbitrary background checks turn any company into a magnet for lawsuits. A written background check policy prevents this from happening as it ensures everyone is on the same page.

With a concrete set of guidelines put into place, key decision-makers will be attuned to the type of background checks to be conducted, for whom it will be conducted, and how the results will be interpreted.

Determine the Types of Background Checks To Be Conducted

Pre-employment screening comes in many forms. Depending on the size and nature of your business, you can either conduct all or a select few of these background checks.

The type of background check you’ll implement also varies by position. For example, credit checks may be necessary for positions requiring financial discretion while driving record checks are considered non-negotiable for employees who will operate company vehicles.

When drafting a background check policy, specify which background checks will be performed, and for whom. Here’s a rundown of the different types of background checks to help you get started:

• Basic identity-check – involves checking the validity of the applicant’s social security number and tracing everything associated with it. This includes name, alias, date of birth, and address.
• Criminal records check – wades through databases to check whether an individual has felony or misdemeanor convictions at federal, state, and county levels. Arrest records can result in either conviction or dismissal but it depends on your state which one can be included in your report. In California, for instance, you can’t review arrest records unless they resulted in a conviction. Criminal background checks also involve searches on multi-state sex offender registries and U.S. terror watch lists.
• Civil courts check – brings to light any non-criminal suits that the candidate has been involved in. These may include restraining orders, civil rights violations, or small claims recorded by federal and county civil courts.
• Credit history check – is a required pre-employment screening for candidates vying for jobs in the financial sector. Financial responsibility is a prerequisite in managing other people’s assets, making this type of background check a reliable way to filter out candidates applying for a bookkeeping job or a position in the bank or brokerage. A credit history check collects information about any bankruptcies, unpaid bills collection, tax liens, and payment history associated with the applicant’s name.
• Motor vehicle report – provides insights into a candidate’s driving competency. The driving record check confirms whether the candidate’s driving license is valid. It also brings up any traffic violation and suspension, giving employers a clear picture of the person’s behavior on the road. It’s a required pre-employment screening for applicants who will drive company-owned vehicles for business purposes.
• Employment verification – is the first line of defense against candidates who usually embellish their resumes or omit crucial information to sway hiring decisions in their favor. To put it simply, it’s a background check that ensures the applicants are really as experienced and qualified for the job position as they’re claiming to be. To verify the applicant’s employment history, HR professionals usually reach out to the previous employers to ask about the applicant’s job title, date of employment, duties performed, and circumstances surrounding the applicant’s departure.
• Education verification – mitigates the risk of hiring an impostor, especially for executive-level positions that require advanced degrees. It ensures the candidate went to the exact school and earned the exact degrees as stated on the resume.

The list above is not exhaustive, as companies or staffing firms can also employ other background checks as needed.

Healthcare sanction checks, for example, can be conducted to verify the healthcare professional’s history. Someone with a long list of disciplinary actions, suspensions, or penalties may not be automatically disqualified, but they provide insights into the candidate’s professionalism.

If the applicant is based in the US but previously studied, worked, or lived overseas, there are also international background checks to capture vital details that would have been missed otherwise.

Decide Which Background Checks Should Be Performed on Each Applicant Category

Not all applicants should be subjected to the same set of background checks. After all, employees have varying levels of responsibilities. You don’t push a candidate applying for an entry-level position to the same stringent screening procedure that applicants for a senior management role undergo.

Therefore, it’s imperative to clearly state in the background check policy not only the types of pre-employment screening to be conducted but also for whom. One way to pull this off is by dividing the applicants into different categories and deciding which background checks will be conducted on each category.

For example, Category 1 is at the bottom of the hierarchy so it may include employees or contractors with no access to the company’s operational processes. The cleaning staff belongs to this category and they can be hired after going through basic identity and criminal background checks.

Category 2, meanwhile, may cover most of the company’s employees who use the workstations, drive company vehicles, and have access to operational processes. Therefore, they should be subjected to education verification and motor vehicle report in addition to basic background checks.

Employees in Category 3 are at the top of the hierarchy as they have direct access to the company’s critical resources and information. They include internal auditors, department heads, and senior management. More responsibilities mean more stringent screening. So on top of the background checks required for the previous two categories, Category 3 members will also be subjected to additional and more comprehensive pre-employment screening.

Consult With a Lawyer To Ensure Compliance With Labor Laws

Writing a background policy from scratch without advice from an attorney or the state labor department is a lawsuit waiting to happen. This is because background checks are covered by federal, state, and local laws, and failure to comply with any of these may result in costly and lengthy litigations.

Things get more complicated for multistate employers that have to contend with multiple laws governing multiple jurisdictions. With the help of a lawyer, companies and staffing firms can identify where these laws overlap and figure out how to move forward without violating anything.

In summary, here’s how legal advice can ensure your background check policy complies with rules and regulations:

• Timing of the background checks. Ban-the-box laws prohibit companies or staffing firms from inquiring about the applicant’s criminal history on the initial job application. If you’re in the state, city, or country where ban-the-box regulations are in full effect, you can’t conduct a background check until after a conditional job offer is made. However, exceptions may apply depending on the size of the company and where it’s located. In Washington D.C., for example, ban-the-box law applies only to companies with at least 15 employees working in the district.
• Process of conducting background checks. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) has laid out guidelines to make sure the applicant is aware of the background check from beginning to end. FCRA requires employers to provide a consent form to the applicants informing them that a background check will be conducted for employment purposes. In case the background check results led the employer to reject the candidate’s application, FCRA also requires the employer to follow a three-step adverse reaction process. This procedure involves sending the applicant a copy of the background report, waiting for the candidate to respond or make an appeal, before finally sending the adverse action notice.
• Criminal records to be used for background checks. Federal and state laws impose restrictions on the type of records companies can use to influence their hiring decisions. FCRA, for instance, states that the credit history checks should exclude bankruptcies after 10 years and paid tax liens after seven years, among others. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) also enforces the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which basically prevents employers from making a hiring decision based solely on a person’s criminal record. Discrimination can get you into a lot of trouble so avoid relying on criminal records that have nothing to do with the job position the candidate is applying for. Companies should also consider the nature of the offense and the length of time since the applicant completed the sentence.

As if the federal laws are not complex enough, some state laws also overlap with them and should likewise be considered when drafting the background check policy.

For instance, several states have banned the use of credit reports as pre-employment screening. In places where they’re only restricted, credit reports can only be used to bolster the screening process for applicants in banks and other financial institutions.

Step 2: Choose a Reliable Background Check Company

Deciding to conduct background checks on your own is like a maze that untrained companies will probably never get out of. If you’re not equipped to do background checks, even obtaining criminal records at the courthouse can take almost a lifetime. As a result, potential stellar candidates will lose patience and apply to the competitors instead.

Federal, state, and local laws also govern background checks so unless you have in-house legal counsel available 24/7, lawsuits are always one simple mistake away.

Fortunately, there are third-party providers that can help companies and staffing firms take the guesswork out of background checks.

If you already have a background check policy in place, the next step is to find a third-party provider that ticks all of your boxes. If you have a huge hiring volume, for example, there are companies like Intelius that can meet your needs. By paying a fixed monthly fee, Intelius can conduct unlimited reports about your applicants including their names, aliases, contact information, educational background, employment history, and criminal records, among others.

Intelius can generate reports almost instantly so it’s a good option if you’re looking for basic background checks. Once you’re ready to get more thorough reports, you can home in on the best provider based on two of the most important features that will be discussed below.

Select a Background Check Company With Built-In FCRA Compliance

The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) exists so you won’t overstep the boundaries of background checking. It determines when to conduct background checks and restricts the records you can use so applicants with criminal convictions won’t be discriminated against.

The problem is different states and cities follow FCRA regulations differently. As a result, employers that hire in multiple locations can have a hard time navigating the legalities of background checking.

An FCRA-compliant background check company does all the heavy lifting so companies can hire the best talents without worrying about compliance. If a company you’re dealing with claims to be FCRA-compliant, ask for the documents that can prove it.

A good company is one that offers individualized assessments so each applicant receives an equal opportunity to prove their competence. It also has integrated workflows so you will get a notification when a rejected applicant receives a pre-adverse action notice, and another one when the final adverse notice is issued.

Take Note of Background Check Turnaround Times

How fast a third-party provider delivers background check results varies depending on the type of records you’re requesting.

Basic background checks can be completed almost instantly whereas employment, education, and license verifications can take up to a week to complete. Criminal records in counties where the database isn’t digitized yet also slow down the process so make sure the provider sets a realistic timeline when completing background checks.

The shorter the turnaround time, the better as you don’t want to lose great talents due to delays.
However, make sure the company doesn’t provide quick results at the expense of quality data. It’s common for some screening providers to cut corners in the name of making more profits in the shortest amount of time.

Make sure to do your due diligence when selecting a background check company based on how fast the turnaround time is. The use of an automated system to scrape off information from online criminal databases is usually a red flag unless the provider can prove that the data are the functional equivalent of what they can obtain offline.

Another way providers take shortcuts is by only searching for the applicant’s name and ignoring other aliases they discover just to save time. Choose companies with proprietary technology that performs a more in-depth search to identify different names associated with an individual, especially those who changed names either by marriage or a civil court proceeding.

Lastly, investigate how the company obtains the records. There are screening firms that outsource tasks to business processing centers in India and the Philippines to save on labor costs. Not only are they making applicants’ data vulnerable to identity theft but also putting the company’s reputation at risk by letting poorly trained workers manually access courthouse records.

Step 3: Prepare the Applicant for the Pre-Employment Screening

As per FCRA regulations, you can’t perform background checks without the applicant’s consent. The process should also be delayed until a conditional job offer has been made to ensure there’s no prejudice against those with past criminal convictions.

These prerequisites are necessary to establish transparency, making both parties less likely to be involved in lawsuits when things don’t work out in the end.

Notify the Applicant About the Impending Background Checks

Before any background check company can do its job, you need to obtain the applicant’s permission first.

This is advantageous in two ways. If the applicant declines to be subjected to pre-employment screening, it means one less problem to deal with. Should the applicant agrees, it can give him time to identify and correct inaccuracies. It will also help him prepare to make a proper appeal in case the results turn out to be unfavorable.

To get the applicant’s consent, the background check provider should issue him two forms: a disclosure form and an authorization form.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recommends including in the disclosure form a statement that assures any application won’t be automatically rejected based on criminal conviction alone. The applicant must be given the peace of mind that the employer will consider the gravity of the conviction, the circumstances surrounding the conviction, and how much time has passed since the conviction before making a hiring decision.

To consent to the background check, the applicant must fully understand what’s written on the disclosure form and subsequently sign the authorization form provided.

In addition to the two forms mentioned, the applicant must also be given a copy of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) document entitled “A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.” This document ensures the applicant knows his rights are protected under FCRA and that the employer is obligated to perform background checks without violating these rights.

Make a Conditional Job Offer

A job offer contingent on the completion of the required background checks is considered best practice. This is especially true if the company is hiring in states where ban-the-box laws are implemented.

Ban the box prohibits employers from conducting pre-employment screening during the initial interview or prior to making a job offer. This law is now being applied to private employers in states such as California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Washington.

Step 4: Perform the Background Check

Outsourcing background checks to an FCRA-compliant provider takes away a huge burden from your shoulders. By contrast, conducting an in-house background check requires that you have your own infrastructure to automate the process, as well as a technical team to take care of system upkeep.

Depending on the types of data you’ll need to obtain, a background check can be completed within a span of two to five days. As mentioned previously, it’s imperative to deal with a third-party provider that guarantees quick turnaround time without sacrificing the quality of the results.

Conduct Basic Identity Verification

A basic background check can be completed almost instantly, provided you have already obtained the applicant’s personal details.

In order to perform an initial identity check, you need the person’s name, social security number, birth date, and addresses for the past seven years. The addresses are needed so the screening firm won’t miss any criminal convictions recorded in other states or counties outside of the applicant’s current place of residence.

Once the data are entered in the background checking company’s web portal, the system will return results that will determine what steps you should take next. If the initial identity verification returns questionable results, you can decide not to proceed to the next step until the issue is addressed. Otherwise, you can perform more in-depth background checks.

Proceed to More Thorough Background Checks

For most employee categories, basic identity verification is just the first step. In order to construct a more accurate portrait of a person’s character and history, you need to conduct background checks using multiple databases.

Here’s an overview of some of the standard components of background checks and what is often involved in each of them:

• Criminal record check – entails a comprehensive search of criminal databases at federal, state, and county levels. Employers face the challenge of getting access to records from multiple jurisdictions, but a competent background check company can provide the right assistance.
• Civil records check – reveals any employment-related lawsuits associated with the applicant. There’s no connection between record departments of different counties so the assistance of a background check provider is likewise highly sought after.
• Employment, education, and license verification – are conducted to ensure the applicants are really who they claim to be. Altogether, these background checks take a lot of time to complete. The data needed to complete the verification are available in public records but one with a signed release can obtain them.
• Credit check – involves evaluation of the applicant’s credit history. However, the data are off-limits to the public and the credit bureaus won’t disclose them unless you have the permission, right, and authority to obtain them.
• Motor vehicle records – refer to driving records that can be released to a background check provider with a signed release.

Step 5: Make a hiring decision based on background check results

The outcome of background checks can either be favorable or unfavorable to the applicant. Apparently, it’s easy to issue a permanent job offer to applicants with no criminal convictions. But what if the qualified candidate isn’t starting with a clean slate? With FCRA regulations, ban-the-box laws, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forbidding employers from rejecting applications based on past criminal acts, the answer is not as straightforward.

Subject the background check results to multiple levels of review

When making a critical hiring decision that can impact the entire organization, multiple pairs of eyes are better than one. By putting the background check results under the scrutiny of several key decision-makers, biased judgments are thrown out of the picture. For example, a decision made by a hiring manager can be reviewed by the vice president for human resources, the vice president of benefits and compliance, or both. This ensures accuracy and principle of fairness are observed and no great talent is wasted through a haphazard decision.

Of course, there are instances when you can’t exercise the same fairness. If the person is applying for a government position and the federal government explicitly mentions it’s not open to anyone with felony convictions, then you must follow the rule. In most cases, however, a three-part test can come in handy.

Also known as a “targeted screen,” the three-part test involves examining the nature or gravity of the crime, the context of the said crime, and how long ago since it was committed. For example, if a person was charged with possession of marijuana when he was a teenager, it’s probably safe to give him a chance so long as he has all the qualifications needed to fulfill the role. But even if the crime is serious enough to prevent an otherwise strong applicant from being considered for the job, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) still offers hope in the form of individualized assessment.

Provide individualized assessment to rejected applicants

An individualized assessment simply means giving applicants who have been deprived of an opportunity a chance to redeem themselves. For all you know, there might be a real inaccuracy in the background check results and an individualized assessment gives the applicant enough time to set the record straight.

In order for an individualized assessment to take place, employers must follow a three-step adverse action process. An adverse action is a procedure employers need to complete when rejecting applications after the background results have been obtained. The background check company may perform the needed adverse action process on the employer’s behalf but the important decisions must still be made by the latter.

Here are the three steps required to ensure the applicant is given an individualized assessment:

• First, send a pre-adverse action letter to the applicant notifying the person about your decision and how the background check results influenced the negative outcome. Along with the pre-adverse action notice, you should also include a copy of the background check report, the contact details of the third-party provider that ran the background checks, and a copy of the FTC’s “A Summary of Your Rights Under the FCRA.”
• Give the applicant ample time to process the outcome so that he or she can file a dispute if necessary. Although the standard waiting time is five business days, some states governed by ban-the-box laws require longer. Make sure the background check company you’re working with is aware of the regulations so the automated adverse action process can be adjusted accordingly.
• Once the waiting time is over, and nothing has influenced you to change your decision, you can then send the final adverse action notice to the applicant.

Make a final hiring decision

In case the applicant showed resiliency in proving his or her innocence, or if the background check results prove to be inaccurate, refrain from sending the final adverse action letter.

If the position is of critical importance to the company, organize an appeal panel so a reasonable decision can be made. This panel may include representatives from the Legal, HR, Security, and other departments deem to be important in making company-wide decisions.

If the majority agrees, you can push through with the job offer and mitigate the risks of the decision by conducting post-employment background checks.

Are you looking for multiple people to fill the same position within a tight deadline? Or perhaps you have a large number of quality applicants and don’t have the time or budget for multiple one-on-one interviews?

You may have already considered conducting a group interview in these situations, but the fact that you’ve never done it before has deterred you.

Conducting group interviews is more challenging than interviewing candidates one-on-one. It requires great leadership, lots of preparation, and some assistance from your colleagues. But the benefits of conducting group interviews do outweigh the challenges.

Today, we are going to take you through the most important steps of conducting a group interview to ensure you can pull them off without a hitch.

The Easy Parts of Conducting a Group Interview

Group interviews are the easiest way to fill a lot of positions for the same role type quickly. You’ll benefit from saving both time and money on the hiring process, while also speeding up that process if you need to fill those positions promptly.

One of the biggest benefits of conducting group interviews is that you have the unique opportunity of comparing equally qualified candidates side-by-side. You’ll also be able to observe how these candidates interact with others and observe their behaviors in dealing with multiple situations. This process can help make the successful candidate an obvious choice over others.

Recruiting the best candidates is even easier with recruiting software such as Workable. It has hundreds of job description templates, ready for you to craft a killer job advertisement. When you’re ready to advertise, it will post your open job role to over 200 job boards with the click of a single button. It will even streamline all your applications into one centralized portal. You’ll be hiring top-level candidates in time with Workable on your side.

The Difficult Parts of Conducting a Group Interview

Executing the perfect group interview can be tricky. A good interviewer will be able to lead and moderate the group, while also observing individual candidates at the same time. This does require some practice and multi-tasking skills, so it’s common to find this part difficult at first.

Conducting a group interview also requires a lot of planning and preparation. Some people struggle in this area, assuming they can get away with planning one or two activities and then just let the conversation flow to observe the candidates. But if you want the best candidates to shine, you need to plan some thought-provoking and challenging exercises to clearly separate the group.

Step 1: Pre-Recruitment Planning

The key to any successful interview is planning. This is especially true when it comes to group interviews as there are more candidates and more positions to fill. Get your planning underway with the following tasks.

Determine the Number of Candidates Required

Group interviews are typically utilized when an organization needs multiple candidates to fill the same job role or want to compare many similarly matched candidates side-by-side.

With this in mind, it’s a great idea to start by determining how many candidates are required to meet your business needs. This will also allow you to evaluate the job’s responsibilities and make any changes before the recruitment.

Determine the Interview Process

There are two main types of group interview structures. There are group discussions and group activities. In practice, most group interviews are a hybrid of these two formats, which allows interviewers to get a well-rounded impression of each candidate in different scenarios.

Then, following the group interview, most organizations would include at least one final round of one-on-one interviews before offering the candidate the role. Ideally, you’ll set this up early on to allow for in-depth planning and coordination in the future steps.

Secure a Venue for the Interview

Most offices won’t have a big enough space to accommodate a group interview, so you’ll most likely need to reserve an independent space for the purpose. Make sure the room is equipped with enough tables and chairs for the group and also has enough space for the group to break out into smaller groups easily.

This step is all about gathering your thoughts on how the interview process will unfold. It gives you an opportunity to outline the organization’s needs, to start the recruitment process with clear guidelines in place.

Step 2: Recruit the Candidates

In order to conduct a group interview, you’ll need some candidates. So this step is all about the recruitment process in the lead-up to the interview.

Enlist a Recruitment Tool

Managing a recruitment process from start to finish is complex enough for one candidate let alone the multiple you’ll be recruiting for your group interview. Instead of manually managing this process, you’ll want to enlist a savvy recruitment tool such as Workable to help you with the process.

Instead of manually posting your open job role to multiple job boards, Workable will automatically post it to up to 200 job sites at once, putting your job advertisement in front of thousands of candidates. You can even automate interview scheduling by allowing candidates to select the group interview time slot that suits them.

You’ll also be able to manage the entire hiring process with a centralized hiring pipeline. Collaborate with colleagues on top-level candidates and guide your hiring teams through fair and objective evaluations, mitigating bias and putting the best candidates forward.

It’s safe to say that recruiting and hiring are made easy with Workable.

Create the Job Posting

Crafting the job description is a walk in the park with Workable. You’ll have access to over 700+ job description templates, which are optimized for search and job board performance, ready to copy and paste.

Start by highlighting what the role entails and the ideal skills and experience required to be successful in applying. Don’t forget to also showcase the perks and benefits candidates can expect in return if they’re successful in attaining the position. Including these details will ensure you’re enticing top-level talent to apply.

Post the Role Vacancy on Multiple Platforms

Once you’ve crafted the perfect job advertisement, Workable will post your open job role to over 200 free and premium job boards, including Indeed and LinkedIn, with the click of a button.

Then as applications roll in, Workable will collect and organize them, then add them to your Workable pipeline meaning you can review candidates from hundreds of job sites, all in one place.

Step 3: Group Interview Preparation

As the applications are rolling in, it’s time to get prepared for the group interview. The following tasks are vital in ensuring that the interview process will go smoothly. Ideally, you’ll cover these steps before applications close so you can swiftly move into the interview stage.

Prepare Interview Components

In the pre-recruitment planning stage, you would have decided on the rough structure of the group interview. Now it’s time to settle on how many components you’ll include and what they’ll entail.

Will you conduct one activity segment and one discussion segment? Will you include an ice-breaker activity to get the group feeling more relaxed and comfortable? How long will you allow for each component?

These are all questions that should be answered and prepared prior to the interview day.

Create Interview Scorecards

Once you’ve decided on how many components the interview will have, you can create interview scorecards to match each segment. These scorecards are vital to collecting relevant information on each candidate on the day.

The scorecards will provide direction for fellow interviewers of what they should be looking for in a candidate to ensure sufficient information is collected for each person. Interview scorecards also help to eliminate any individual biases that unintentionally arise, by providing clear guidelines to measure against.

Contact Candidates with Interview Details

Depending on how many candidates you have, you may hold multiple group interviews. If this is the case, alert the candidates of the available dates and times, including details such as interview time and location, format, and duration of the interview too.

Using software such as Workable, you’ll be able to send a personalized, bulk communication email including all these details to candidates. Furthermore, candidates will be able to schedule themselves for their prepared interview slot, saving recruiters dreaded email back-and-forth in the process.

Step 4: Conducting the Group Interview

Interview day has arrived and if you’ve followed the steps above, you’ll be well prepared to execute a successful group interview. And although you can’t predict exactly how the group interviews will unfold with multiple different personalities in one room, you can still follow your plan.

Welcome and Introductions

Start the group interview by introducing yourself, the fellow interviewers, and the company. This is a great opportunity to discuss the company’s mission and goals, the job position, and outline the interview process.

Then invite the candidates to introduce themselves to the rest of the group. If you want to turn this into an icebreaker activity, you can have candidates pair up and spend five minutes getting to know one another and then present each other to the group. Here you have your first opportunity to observe candidates interacting with their potential colleagues.

Provide Clear Instructions

By now the candidates should be relaxed and ready to dive into the interview. Your job as the interview leader is not only to lead the interview but also to moderate the candidates if things get a little competitive or heated.

Start by providing general instructions for each segment. Then provide clear, in-depth instructions for the first activity, and break the candidates into smaller teams to start. While they’re working on this activity, you should be keeping track of time and informing candidates when the time for the activity is coming to an end.

You’ll repeat this for as many segments as is required, potentially with breaks in between to give everyone a chance to refresh themselves.

Carefully Observe Candidates

While the candidates work on the group discussion and activities, it’s time for you to carefully observe each candidate. It is hard to keep track of multiple candidates at once, which is why it’s important to use the scorecards you’ve prepared earlier. Note down the candidates’ answers and behaviors. Later, you’ll be able to rely on these scorecards to review and compare the candidates with relevant information.

When you’re observing the candidates, it’s important to consider their body language, how they interact with others, and the role they take on in the group. This will give you a much clearer picture of each person’s true character, than simply relying on the answers they provide.

Wrap Up the Interview

As the activities come to a close, it’s time to wrap up the interview. Gather all the candidates together once more and explain what happens next.

At this stage, it’s a good idea to let the candidates know when they can expect to hear from you, remind them of the remaining interview process, and an expected timeline for these next steps to take place. Give them a chance to ask any last questions about the company or the process too.

Don’t forget to thank the candidates for their time and effort and wish them all the best of luck.

It does take an experienced interviewer to pull off a smooth group interview. If it’s your first time interviewing multiple candidates at once, just follow these steps, lead the room with confidence, and the rest will fall into place.

Step 5: Evaluate the Candidates

Having successfully pulled off an impeccable group interview, it’s time to evaluate the candidates and work towards the next steps of the recruitment process.

Sort Out Your Notes

Start by sorting out your notes on each candidate over the process so far. These notes might include each candidate’s resume and application details, as well as the scorecard notes you wrote during the group interview.

Take some time to go over each candidate and jot down any further thoughts or impressions you had, to gain clarity over where you sit with each candidate’s performance. You can also sort the candidate’s into most likely to least likely to hire to make the debrief with fellow interviewers smoother.

Debrief Session for Interviewers

Ideally, you’ll debrief with the other interviewers within 24 hours of holding the group interview to ensure the conduct of each candidate remains front of mind.

This session is all about bringing together your notes to collectively decide who progresses to the next round, and who doesn’t, and why. This is a really important step in the process as it ensures that bias or favoritism is left out of the equation.

Provide Closure to All Candidates

When all interviewers have agreed on who is in and who is out, take the time to provide closure to all candidates. Let successful candidates know about the next steps and provide detailed information about these.

Send personalized post-interview rejection emails to unsuccessful candidates. It’s also a great idea to provide constructive feedback to those who didn’t make the cut, so they can focus on improvements for future interviews.