00:00 Vicki Lynn Brunskill

Hello and welcome back to the Argyle HR hiring and retention workforce Summit. My name is Vicki Lynn Brunskill with our guests. Great to have everyone joining us today. Just a couple of notes before I turn things over to our panel moderator. First, a quick reminder to stop by our sponsors virtual booths at any time during today’s event, and for the following week. Our partners are committed to providing you with valuable content, and a great overall experience today. And anytime during the event, you can visit their virtual booths from the main agenda page. And those do include complimentary materials, information and meet and greet opportunities. To ask questions throughout the session and all sessions simply type into the Q&A chat and we will address your questions at the end of the session. And now without further delay, I’d like to introduce our moderator, Rose Rogers, Chief Human Resources Officer at vortex industries. We are so excited to have Rosen our panelists with us for a panel discussion titled talent acquisition, a new look at hiring strategies. Welcome, rose over to you.

00:59 Rose Rogers

Thank you. And good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining, you know such an important subject of talent management, acquisition, recruiting and retention. And, as mentioned, I’m a CHRO at vortex doors. So, I think about my career. My number one job is talent. And so now let me introduce our panelists, Carly.

01:23 Carly Ackerman

Thank you so much, Carly Ackerman, I’m the director of customer experience at Eightfold AI, a talent intelligence platform that supports the end-to-end talent lifecycle. Really excited to be here today and share a little bit of my perspective from a tech enabled from the tech enabled lens.

01:39 Melissa Frank

Hey, my name is Melissa Frank. I’m the Director of Talent Recruitment at New York Public Radio, which is a public media organization in New York City. My background is in education recruiting, before I moved on to media, and I’ve been in recruitment for about 15 years.

02:01 Rose Rogers

Thank you, and Shilpa.

02:03 Shilpa Kulkarni

Hey, my name is Shilpa Kulkarniand I’m a Senior Director of Technic routine with Expedia groups. All my career has been in tech recruiting. So before coming to Expedia, I worked at Facebook now Mehta for many years. And before that at Microsoft, so anything related to tech recruiting, probably is something that I can, I’m passionate about, I can help with. So, thank you for having me here.

02:31 Rose Rogers

Great, thank you. So let us get started, we do have some questions that we thought of that we would help drive it. So, the first one, what are some effective and innovative ways that you’ve seen companies use technology to improve how they evaluate and fine tune hiring needs? Shilpa? Why don’t you tell us what you’ve been doing?

02:53 Shilpa Kulkarni

Awesome. And thank you, Rose, this has been, you know, something that all recruiting teams across us and I should say across globe, everyone is adapting. And the first thing that comes to my mind is artificial intelligence. Lots and lots of ways to use AI to automate tasks like screening the resumes or, you know, scheduling the initial interviews, or even finding out what the candidate’s passions are, AI is a really very useful tool. And I feel that it will free up time for recruiters and sources to do more strategic partnerships or to build a relationship or give that human touch to the whole process. The second thing that I’m seeing more and more being used and this is in the volume writing nowadays, is use of predictive analysis. That means you see how the candidates are they how do they grow within their career, how do they grow in the projects, and then potentially use the predictive analysis tools to find out whether they are going to be really successful in the company and the culture in a given role that they you will be offering them, or they will be accepting within your company. And the third thing, obviously, going global. So, technology is helping immensely. Now look, we all are on Zoom talking to many, many people logging in from different locations. Getting the right candidate is important. And so going global or going in various locations, becomes equally important. So, these three things, I feel that technology is of help, rather utmost help to make us do the better recruitment every single day and even to provide a good candidate experience.

04:45 Rose Rogers

Thank you. Thank you, Carly. Anything to add?

04:48 Carly Ackerman

Yeah, I’d love to zoom in on the dimension of AI. I’m a little bit partial to AI in the talent space as you might imagine. But what really is exciting to me about this novel really the fact that we’re we are here with an audience of HR leaders. And we’re ready and prepared to talk about AI without running for the hills. I think that’s, you know, step one is we’re just excited that we’re prepared to take it on. The potential of AI within the HR space is so huge. This technology is what’s going to allow you to shift from hiring for experience to hiring for potential. So, AI is going to afford you the opportunity to really look at insights related to skills and a candidate’s ability to learn. And that means hiring can go beyond the resume beyond the cover letter, even beyond the referral or the recommendation. So, recruiters and hiring managers just have a better sense of what a candidate can do tomorrow, rather than just what they’re bringing with them today, based upon their prior experience.

05:48 Rose Rogers

Right. Thank you, Melissa, anything else that you’d like to share with the group?

05:53 Melissa Frank

Yeah, I mean, the panelists here are, you know, come from, you know, some more tech backgrounds than I have. So, I’m working with smaller organizations, you know, public media organizations where we might not have the level of resources to be able to implement some of these technologies. But I think coming down to basics when it comes to technology and ensuring that you have consistency in how you’re pulling your reporting. And sticking with, you know, those consistent measures, you’re able to measure how effective your recruiting is, even when we’re talking about implementing AI or other new technologies into it, making sure we’re measuring to see how effective those things are, and how effective even your sourcing techniques are, how effective di is on top of everybody’s mind, how effective your dei strategies are, through polling, consistent reporting on your candidates, as well, I think is something that’s always important to talk about, even if it’s not sort of the most new thing, but I think it’s something that companies don’t aren’t always doing. And without measuring something, it’s really hard to see how effective you are being with that technology or strategy.

07:17 Rose Rogers

I mean, I think, you know, for everyone, the panelists have really shared how important embracing technology is to go into measurements and growth, and, you know, just being able to recognize employees. So really great answers. You know, one of the next questions is kind of two part, you know, how is data fueling higher hiring innovation? But then what challenges are related to data driven hiring someone? So, what do you think about that?

07:48 Melissa Frank

Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting, I think, the challenges sometimes lie in coming away from a human approach to recruiting. So as a recruiter, I see my job as building relationships, ensuring a very streamlined process, engaging candidates very effectively throughout even the smallest of touch points. And I think technology is amazing to measure how you’re doing. And you know, as Carly was talking about, measuring the potential of an employee versus only seeing their experience, but I think it’s equally as important to ensure that that human touch stays throughout the process. So, using the technology in the background, but having the same like, lovely touch points along the way to make a candidate excited about your role, and making sure that they know that you’re really interested in them versus making something very automated throughout the process. So, I’d say like, those are some of the challenges that sometimes come into play if a company is getting too data driven.

08:57 Rose Rogers

Okay, thank you, Carly.

09:00 Carly Ackerman

Yeah, I think the data itself is the challenge, right? I think there’s just so much of it at this point. So, thinking about, you know, from the perspective of an HR leader, being asked to answer questions on at the drop of the hat, about their workforce, the data itself becomes incredibly unwieldy. And the no matter how sophisticated the technology is that you’re using, whether it’s AI or some other form of technology, that’s data driven. It’s only so good as the data that’s that is being inputted into it. So having clean usable and current data and having a lot of data is really going to be paramount. I also think that connecting ROI, right? Like you’re going to have to be able to defend some of the decisions that you’re making some of the investments that you’re making, leveraging data. So, companies that are doing this really well are the ones who are tying ROI to real business outcomes, not just recruiting outcomes, not just as to how quickly you or how much you can reduce the time to hire. But then taking it one step further and tacking that data to real business outcomes in terms of innovation, output productivity, those are the organizations who are really going to see the most bang for their buck in terms of the data that they’re leveraging.

10:19 Rose Rogers

Right. Thank you. Shilpa

10:23 Shilpa Kulkarni

Yeah, great, great PowerPoints, Melissa and Carly, actually. So, quality of data is yes, supremely important, though, the way I and both of you Yes, I completely agree that first off, you really shouldn’t be losing the human test. Secondly, the accuracy, the quality of data, and the amount of data basically, to make the decision, they both are supremely important, the plus side of data, as you mean, all of these boxes are checked is a whole lot basically, you know, you can find out which background or risk or certain skill sets have been, you know, a good quality of hire for your company. Are there any consistent reasons for offer declines? Are there any specific set of candidates who, who are not successful in your in your company? Is it certainty within your company? Is it certain organization is it certain, you know, background these people are coming from, and you can build a training program, you can actually do the internal trainings based on that data? The other thing I always I’m always amused by the set of data and how it is used is build those predictions for the next year. So, what happened last year is pretty much gives me the picture of what is going to happen next year. But again, you require a certain amount of data for that. So plus, one, because data is complex to collect, it’s complex to analyze, but provided that if we start walking on this path, there are some really big flaws. As I said, the predictive analysis, success ratio, quality of fires tends to fail the productivity, and even the candidate experience. So, data is a base for building those metrics, which normally will fit to talent acquisition organizations. That’s how I feel about the data fuel technology, if you want to say so. Great,

12:27 Rose Rogers

thank you. Thank you. Our next question is also two parts, you know, first part, what are the key challenges related to recruiting? And then what is working? And where do you think companies make the biggest mistakes? Melissa, I’ll go ahead and kick off with you again,

12:43 Melissa Frank

Sure, happy to. So, challenges sometimes can be very dependent on your industry or your company, again, coming from public media organization, a lot of the time, the challenges are related to competition in the marketplace, right, being competitive sometimes, with compensation. Sometimes, and I think for especially for a lot of tech driven industries and firms, I could just be a lack of candidates in the marketplace for the skills that you are needing. But I think something that’s really important, no matter what is to ensure as a company, you understand really what your value proposition is. So, for us, sometimes that isn’t compensation. Sometimes that could be other things. For example, you know, having a really flexible workplace, and having a workplace that really values genuinely, not just kind of talks about it, that work life balance. And so, I think what really works when you are speaking with candidates, and when you’re bringing candidates through the process is to ensure that you understand as a company, what your value proposition is, and they get a glimpse of that through all of the different pieces throughout the process. I think sometimes companies can make the mistake of not being clear on their company values, or that value proposition and that can sometimes lead to down the line, a fit that isn’t quite mutual.

14:18 Rose Rogers

Right, thank you. Carly, what are your thoughts?

14:21 Carly Ackerman

I want to I want to jump in on a comment that Melissa made around some of those hard-to-find skills in the market. I think that’s where technology really stands to shine and support recruiting efforts. When you need a specific skill. It’s much easier to find potential candidates for that role when you broaden the scope of what you’re looking for based upon skills that you know, will either propel somebody into that role quickly, or that if they have those skills that they can easily upskill into the role. So, kind of broadening your funnel so to speak using the technology available to identify a broader talent pool, I think is really critical. But in terms of some of the key challenges, one that I think that will probably resonate a lot for folks, the world just continues to give us excuses to talk about how quickly things can change. So late 2020 to early 2023, it’s been no different. We’ve seen market disruptions that have led to reductions in force that were then followed by heavy recruiting efforts, right? Like it’s this, it’s more than an ebb and flow. It’s kind of like a giant wave washing over us, and then trying to retreat and figure out where we go from there. The organizations that have made more flexible, proactive workforce strategies, maybe they’re tapping into contingent talent or gig workers, maybe they’re really monitoring market trends to understand that ebb and flow more effectively. Those are the organizations that we’re able to really contract and expand more nimbly than organizations that were relying heavily on more of that traditional talent planning strategy. So, kind of leveraging the technology in a way that the market disruptions don’t pose yet another challenge to recruiting I think, is, is certainly something that is more available to broader, broader HR teams at this point. Great,

16:19 Rose Rogers

Thank you so much. Shilpa?

16:24 Shilpa Kulkarni

Less, when currently, I was literally thinking about the market tides, you know, it goes up, then it comes down. And it’s been challenging time, quite unproductive, I’m just going to, you know, kind of put a basic recruiter hat at this moment, and lay out two or three things which constantly I have seen as a challenge, irrespective of the industry, irrespective of size of the company, or the field that you are in. The first one, which I consistently feel and advocate for is to have a very clear job description. Whatever it is, whichever company it is, you’re hiring assessment, you’re hiring a CEO of a company, please test it out clearly what you need, where you need, how you need it. Secondly, one size doesn’t fit all. Like even though there is one requisition, you may have someone who is really great in their job, but does not fit into your, you know, the square box of screening candidates. So, know what it takes to hire a good talent? Is it one consistent screening method? Is it more personal interaction? Is it more meeting for a coffee and understanding your skills? Or is it just sending some random test to those candidates and find out if they are a suitable fit. So, the second thing is personalizing that initial screening method to find out who your purple squirrel is what it says, you know, putting out a wide net there. And the third thing is waiting on making hiring decisions for weeks. That actually is a big no, no, for me. Because if you know that someone is really great at their job, then there are 10,000 recruiters out there who know that someone is great at their job. So, move through the process really swiftly. And these three things I consistently feel are important and our challenge throughout the recruitment process, irrespective of the company. And if we want to get better in any of the parameters of talent acquisition with productivity candidate experience, the metrics, we need to get better at these three basic things.

18:42 Rose Rogers

Great, thank you. So, you know, we’re talking about key challenges to recruiting and a question for the audience has come up. And currently, how can we ensure we are inclusive in hiring practices?

18:54 Carly Ackerman

Yeah, I think I was at a conference last week. And it was really interesting to hear Keith Sanderling, the chairman of the EEOC, talking about technology in this space. And what was really exciting to me was to hear somebody whose full-time job is to identify organizations who are improperly using technology and creating bias, say, I want this technology to put me out of a job. So, he’s kind of representing both sides of the coin, right? We know that there are a lot of dangers when it comes to leveraging technology because of the bias it can create. But we also know the power of the technology in terms of eliminating and mitigating bias. So, where I’ve seen where I’ve seen technology really support an inclusive hiring slate, is by removing any sort of indicator of who the person is from a from a personal perspective, right where masking names were hiding any sort of indicators of what gender or race might be. So, what you’re looking at is really the raw capability of the person Send, what they’ve done in the past and more importantly, what they’d be capable of doing in the future. Rather than introducing any sort of data that might trigger some sort of unconscious bias within the person who is reviewing the material. Obviously, at the end of the day, a human need to make the final decision. And through the recruiting process, you’ll get to know the person more effectively, but in terms of creating a funnel that is inclusive technology is allowing us to automatically and automatically remove a lot of the information that might otherwise stop somebody from the get-go from being included in the funnel. Great, thank

20:41

you Shilpa. I know in your work, very technology driven. Something else to add here.

20:50 Shilpa Kulkarni

When we build the inclusive funnel, that we currently say, the second thing that comes in picture is having the inclusive interview panel. So, it is super important that the panel has a different way of thinking about looking at the candidate or assessing the candidate. So as much as it is important to have the inclusive slate that is coming on site, it is important that we are making decisions, which are unbiased. So, at scale, there are these unbiased interview trainings, which I found supremely helpful and having the all-inclusive panel. As we start building the slate, it is even important that the job descriptions companywide that we built internally or externally should be free of any words that explain the gender the race. So, building inclusive job description is important. Building very cautious scale, or the onset slate for all candidate’s diverse candidate is important. And even more important that the company and the company executives are being trained on making those inclusive hiring decisions. So, I think these two three things for things they will help us at least get started on the way there is a long path that we need to build still to bring all this includes inclusive talent onboard.

22:17 Rose Rogers

Thank you. You know, Melissa, how about your thoughts on this important question? Yeah,

22:21 Melissa Frank

um, you know, as I should have said in, in one of the last questions, you know, coming back down to basics, I think is important here, when we’re talking about an entire hiring process for me. Of course, she’ll but starts with the job description. But then after that, having an intake meeting with your hiring manager, or the hiring team, where you’re discussing the process where you are discussing the goals of your company, you are ensuring that you are setting a hiring process upfront with your hiring manager, so you know exactly what the process will be, who will be involved, what stages of the interview, will they be examining what and ensuring that you are on the same page with the hiring manager. So then when you’re having initial conversations with a candidate, they understand what the process is, and you are holding both yourself and your company accountable for what you set out at the outset of the process as far as the steps. Because sometimes what can happen is a hiring manager or hiring team can get excited about a particular candidate and everything gets thrown out the window, and then you’re not you’re not then offering an inclusive and equitable process for other candidates. So, it really does start at the very beginning, at before you even launch a role sometimes in having these conversations. And as Shilpa mentioned, training for managers and for interviewers is so important. So, they have the skills to be able to assess candidates in all facets, including anti bias training that has to come in to be effective in this work.

24:12 Rose Rogers

And, you know, while I’ve got you on the stage here, what do you think are the most important interview tips or techniques that you’ve seen work to assure a candidate is a good fit?

24:23 Melissa Frank

Yeah, I mean, it really does kind of go hand in hand with that, that last question. So again, like training, they’re there, I don’t think is anything more important than having training around proper interviewing techniques. And even in shoring. And I’ve heard this before when people kind of come into some, some of the panel interviews, which I think is definitely an important part of the process. They feel like they’re coming up against the firing squad. So, ensuring you’re even training your managers and your panelists, to be friendly, to make it a space where people feel comfortable. Because if people aren’t feeling comfortable, your candidates aren’t feeling comfortable, they’re surely not going to be able to put their best foot forward, and you’re not going to be able to get a really true view of that candidate in that interview process. So, I think that’s important is setting the stage to make it comfortable for candidates. But again, coming back to the basics, behavioral interview questions, and ensuring that you have examples of things that the candidate has done that aligns to your job, or your values, or your industry or whatever you’re looking for, is so important. And, you know, as a recruiter, I am fairly involved in the panel interview process. So much so that I’m even coaching on the questions that they’re asking. So, if you don’t have a lens, as a recruiter into the interview, it’s very hard to help, you know, add knowledge and skill into the interview process.

25:53 Rose Rogers

Great, thank you, Shilpa, what are your thoughts?

25:57 Shilpa Kulkarni

So, really, what I feel is when you are interviewing a candidate, the candidate is interviewing you as well. It is not one way process, and you are a representative of the company. So very basics, that you come prepared for the interview, when you are interviewing someone know what role, what questions and what are you really assessing the candidate for, be prepared to share your story, be prepared to share your experiences and why you are still working with the company because you are a face of that company to a candidate who is going to go out and either say good things about the company, or bad things about the company. So, you have bought at stake, then the candidate I always feel that way. Secondly, it is important that personalize the interview be professional be positive, it is it is very, very possible that as like a new grad, if you are a professional who did not interview from last 1015 years, and even nowadays, you see that kind of candidates a lot who have been you know, working with one company 1015 years in intake field, currently, there have been a layer of waves going on. So, we have been talking to Kenya, Sudan to an interview for 1518 years, it is important that you are making them comfortable making them feel positive. And you are you’re putting your best foot forward, you are a good listener, you are more organized, and you’re prepared for the interview. And you’re ready to provide specific examples, asking the right questions, and even sharing your stories. So again, going back to the best candidate experience that you can provide is something you should absolutely be doing as an interviewer and explaining the next steps to so I feel these couple of basic things, in addition to your interview questions will lead into get great candidate experience and the hiring process.

27:54 Rose Rogers

Great. Thank you. Carly, what about your thoughts?

27:58 Carly Ackerman

I obviously have been kind of working in and around the recruiting space at APL, but my history and background is in broader talent strategy. So, my prior life before joining Eightfold I was focusing on creating a perspective on what is a skills-based organization, I’m sure that a lot of folks on the call right now are probably either excited to hear that or rolling their eyes because it’s been around for a while. And I’m not sure that we’ve been able to like really to put our finger on what that means. But, you know, I’m still really passionate about the idea of organizations kind of shifting their talent practices to becoming more skills based. So, I say all of that, because I think one really critical component of the hiring process that is very difficult to nail, and I would love for Shilpa or Melissa to call me out if I’m wrong about this. But trying to assess for what I think we all commonly refer to as soft skills, and I love that name for them. But you know, power skills, pivot skills, the skills that allow people to apply their hard skills in different contexts and really flex as a person. Those are just notoriously difficult to figure out if a person has it just over the course of a few interviews. So, I did a little bit of homework because I’ve always just felt, you know, this is really important, but I’m not really sure how to how to how to nail it in the interview process. And interestingly enough, if anybody out there as an economist, as subscriber, there was a recent article that talked about this. So, I’ll share a little bit of that. There is some research coming out of Rice University that found that people who can accurately gauge which members of a team wield influence have the power skill, so to speak of status acuity. And there have been some additional research done where status ability to identify somebody’s status has a lot of situations and adjacencies to other power skills. So being able to accurately read a room is a really great sign that somebody has those, those other power skills like influence communication. So, it’s something to consider. And then some other, you know, you can just do the simple things of asking how the candidate interacted during the recruitment process with other members of the team. How do they treat the sorcerer? How did they treat the scheduler? If it was an in-person meeting? How did they treat the person who brought them into the room, right? I think it’s just really important to make sure that not only is this person going to be a cultural fit for you, but that they’ll be able to last a long time knowing that in the world that we live in, the job that they’re hired for is probably not the job that they’re going to be in one to two years down the line.

30:54 Rose Rogers

Great thank you. You know, it’s funny currently, because I wanted to move away from soft skills myself. And so now I’m using agilities. You know, like critical thinking, you know, you think of like being agile and being able to do it. So, I’m, you know, using agilities. But while I have you on, we have a really interesting question from the audience, and it’s really a technical one. My team has been utilizing AI in coordination with their ATS, but we’re still looking at ways to integrate new AI capabilities such as chat GPT. What do you see in regard to chat GPT and new AI K build capabilities from recruiting and hiring, moving forward in hell? How will it alter hiring strategies in the near future?

31:38 Carly Ackerman

I man, I wish I could get chopped up to do my job for me, I still haven’t figured it out. But that said, definitely a lot of applications. Before I say anything about that, though. My first caveat is to be careful, right. Chad GPT is not yet regulated. And if you’ve been following what’s been going on in Congress for the past couple of days, even the founder of chat, GPT is saying we need to regulate this stuff, because it’s dangerous. So within the recruiting space, especially if you’re in a highly regulated industry, just be careful and make sure as with any sort of tech adoption, that you’re making sure, from a compliance and regulatory perspective, that you’re comfortable with it, and it’s explainable, not only to your to the people using it, but to the end user, it the folks who are impacted by it, the candidates, the recruiters. So that’s my first caveat. But in terms of what we’re seeing out there in the market, a lot of AI platforms are introducing something similar to the copilot that Microsoft introduced for a recruiter. So, think about your job description. If you if you need to create a job description, you can do it in seconds instead of hours or weeks requiring back and forth communication and alignment internally. So, So job descriptions are definitely going to be sped up with chat GPT as well as just kind of navigating the recruiting process if all of the data is in one place. Having conversational AI kind of helped guide the identification of candidates the process of doing that. We’re seeing more and more of that come online. But again, with the caveat that a lot of the vendors who are introducing chat, GPT powered functionality are giving their clients the opportunity to opt out because it still is not regulated.

33:31 Shilpa Kulkarni

When one thing to add in there is charging at what where I use charge per day is getting the data of the location. So, say for example, if you’re hiring someone who is working in marketing, or someone like data scientists judge if he told me that there are the highest number of data scientists in Austin. So, if and that data was pretty accurate, because we at Expedia, we do pull data from various resources to build our own talent acquisition strategy as to which locations we want to build for certain skill sets where we want to grow the team and charge up and bar both AI tools. They actually gave me pretty accurate data even though when I compare them with each other, and with the manual data that my data analytics team provided, so far that yes, I would say 60% accuracy in the job description because they did not show the inclusivity by the way, they just build the job description. So, for the vanilla skills like building job description, building the search strings, giving you the data per location, that that to provide some help, but it would not replace the human accuracy. I should You put it out there, and it’s not regulated. Great.

35:03 Rose Rogers

Thank you. You know, taking another audience question, Melissa, it can be challenging to have a high volume of candidates per requisition. What are your thoughts on assessment screenings? Are these effective and hiring the best candidate fits?

35:19 Shilpa Kulkarni

Yeah, I mean, it’s a, that’s a difficult question sort of depends on how high your volume is, and how quickly you want to whittle down that candidate pool. For me, I typically steer clear on an initial assessment as sort of first interaction, because I think you can very easily knock people out of your candidate pool, that would be a great fit. So, I hate to say it, and I’ve, I’ve worked in some pretty high-volume places. It really comes down to getting through those applications. You know, there are definitely ways you can whittle them down quickly, depending on your requirements. So, you know, for example, if you’re requiring certain bits of information, and they don’t have it, you can knock them out very quickly within seconds of screening. But if you’re using like basic assessment questions, that are not super skills based, maybe it’s an experience, number, years of experience, things like that, that might be okay to knock people out. But having an assessment go out as a first interaction, I that’s not something that I prefer, as a recruiter personally, I think you could lose out on a lot of great candidates that way.

36:42 Rose Rogers

So, we’ve got another question here currently, really, for you and me that we’ve mentioned not a fan of the term of soft skills, and to ensure that I’m aware of potential concerns with certain terminology, what are we hearing about this long use term that may warrant assigning it to a new name, so I’ll kind of go first. So, you know, for me, soft skills are the hard stuff. So, it’s funny that they call them soft skills, because it is literally the hardest competency for any inspiring, you know, aspiring leader or leader to have. And so, I do use soft skills. But the reason I’m sort of rebranding under agilities, is there are a lot more assessment capabilities where I can have people take even self-assessments of sort of how they show up and critical thinking or communication and so forth, where I just felt soft skills were too broad. Carly, what was your thoughts on soft skills?

37:36 Melissa Frank

It’s very similar, I find that soft skills not only are the hard thing to get right, but I also find that they’re incredibly important to be successful long term. So, the word soft, just kind of connotes that they’re not as important as hard skills. So, trying to use a different terminology to help really elevate the fact that these are the most important skills. Not to mention, I’m a subscriber to Josh Bersin. And he definitely has pushed us away from soft skills. I think power skills is his terminology for it.

38:15 Rose Rogers

Thank you. Shilpa, you talked a lot about training. And so, one of the participants was asking, Do you have any suggestions for virtual interview training for managers?

38:31 Shilpa Kulkarni

Yes, yes, yes, to many. So first thing I would, I would really ask is, when you are in person, I will say you have kind of that upper hand because you’re meeting with the candidate in person, you’re able to figure it out from the interaction, how where the candidate is like, in terms of adequately comfortable they are completely in the interview process, they are not, when you are virtually interviewing someone, a you are bound by the time. Secondly, you are there just to finish, you know, certain assessments in a certain given certain time period, what I would say is for any virtual interview, it is super important that you get trained on first off, the candidate getting into the process, first of getting candidate into onto the same page that you are in. And secondly, as I said, the all-inclusive process. So, there are two trainings that I would highly recommend. First is unbiased interview training. The second one is how to be an interviewer. So, this both trainings are my main there are multiple learning platforms which provide these trainings, and they will help you get more influential, interactive, interactive Interviewer So what that means is, basically you’re explaining the role. You’re explaining the company you’re explaining and asking very clear questions, you’re prepared with the follow up questions and our explanation. And you are providing candidate an inclusive experience throughout the interview. And it is as simple as you know, you’re providing the example and you are calling out the gender. For example, He Said, She Said appears versus saying they said, or you are giving a very specific example of your company, which may or may not be related to the candidate or the background that they are coming from, and to which they do not feel that they are connected or benefiting from it or asking a very quick question. So, these two years for the virtual interview are must haves. And what I would suggest is you have some good interviewers, and you have some training interviewers. So never ever have any interviewer just go online and start interviewing before shadowing, and reverse shadowing and training the interviewer on your company’s. So normally I go with five by five, what that means is, you prepare five times you get shadowed by a seasoned interviewer five times and someone who was shadows you and provide you the experience five times before you go on to your interview independently. And that has been heard so far.

41:20 Rose Rogers

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Melissa, this is really interesting question, we’re really struggling to find ways to differentiate our organization to improve candidate attraction player share, please share some ways you’ve seen companies ensure that they stand out.

41:38 Melissa Frank

Yeah, I mean, I think it comes back to something that we talked about a little bit earlier, you have to know what your company’s value proposition is. And you should be highlighting that in every place that you are front facing candidates, whether that’s job descriptions, whether that’s your website, whether that’s initial conversations, you have to know what you have to start off by knowing what exactly your company is offering, in terms of, you know, the life that it will bring them, the values that your company holds, and making sure you’re highlighting that. I think that is then again, you are ensuring a mutual match from candidates that are being attracted to your company and, and candidates that are a good fit for you. So, I would say making sure you are stringing that value proposition along in all of your interactions is certainly a best practice.

42:35 Carly Ackerman

I’d love to jump in on this one as well. I think we also mentioned personalization, earlier personalization of the process. And that starts from the first time they visit your career site. If they have to jump through a million hoops to apply, the likelihood of them getting to the end of that application is slim to none. So, trying to streamline the application process as much as possible. And making it simple enough that you know we talked about, we often talk about visit ratios, right folks who visit the site, how many times they’re visiting the site, let’s talk about how many times they visit the site in relation to how quickly they apply. Ideally, you only want them to visit once they shouldn’t have to come back. So, creating that kind of personalized and very easy experience from the get-go I think is really critical. Thank you.

43:28 Rose Rogers

So, we have come to the end of our time. And really we want to thank the audience such great participation. Our panelists are amazing, so much insight, so much learning today. And now I’d like to hand it back to Vicki Lynn to close us out.

43:44 Vicki Lynn Brunskill

Thank you. Thank you so much, Carly, Melissa, Shilpa and rose for a fabulous panel discussion. We’ve already gotten good feedback on it. So, it’s nice to hear that everyone’s really loving all of your experience. Thank you for sharing it today. I also want to thank everyone for joining us today and let you know that this session along with all of today’s content will be available on demand following the event. Thank you again to a fabulous panel.