We’re excited to announce our inclusion in Indeed’s ATS Partner Program as a Gold Partner. We work closely with Indeed to build reliable integrations, optimizing hiring processes for countless businesses across all industries.
ApplicantStack + Indeed Integration
Indeed is the top-ranked job site in the world, drawing more than 350 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. The goal of the site is to put jobseekers first, offering access to open roles and the option to research companies they are considering working for. With over 245 million resumes on Indeed, employers can also find and connect with top talent, creating a mutually beneficial situation for the workplace.
ApplicantStack is designed for small business clients, helping them compete with major companies for skilled talent. Without the right applicants and new hires, it becomes more difficult to grow and maintain a stellar team. But the recruiting process can take a lot of time and effort, which small business owners may not have to give.
ApplicantStack levels the playing field, and the integration with Indeed gets open roles in front of a wider audience. Sponsored Jobs, which can be created and posted within the platform, attract nearly five times more candidates than non-sponsored jobs. Plus, the applicant-tracking system (ATS) streamlines the recruiting process while ensuring access to all data from one place.
Take Advantage of Indeed + ApplicantStack: A Winning Combination
Learn more about our integration with Indeed and how you can access an all-inclusive hiring & onboarding solution as you build your team.
The job market is a dynamic, living thing that demands adaptability. For businesses of every size, intuition and personal connection are vital for finding ideal candidates. But they are only part of the hiring puzzle: analyzing recruitment metrics gives a more accurate picture of where your hiring process is succeeding and where you could stand to improve.
Understanding Recruitment Metrics and Why They Matter
Recruitment metrics refer to the data that provide insight into the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s hiring process. Metrics are individually insightful but the data is also symbiotic, informing the other. For example, if the most expensive recruitment source you use yields the highest quality candidates, it may be a mistake to reduce that budget because an overall budget metric suggested cost-cutting.
Analyzing hiring metrics gives companies ideas on how to work more efficiently, which hiring methods work the best for your type of business, and can even anticipate growth to generate a long-term hiring plan before it’s critical. In small businesses where employees may wear many different hats—including participation in hiring—collecting and reviewing these metrics is essential to focus and coordinate your efforts.
Recruitment Metrics to Track
Consider tracking these important recruiting metrics:
Time to Fill
Simply put, “time to fill” indicates the number of calendar days it takes to find and hire a new employee. The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) offers a few different starting points:
A hiring manager submitting a job requisition
A job requisition’s approval
A job posting going live online
The end date is typically when a candidate accepts a job offer. This metric can show internal delays in approvals or posting.
Time to Hire
While “time to fill” analyzes the company’s time efficiency, “time to hire” is a more candidate-centered metric. This number indicates the time from when the candidate applies to accepting an offer. It can show lags in company response time, a leading reason for losing out on a potential hire.
Cost Per Hire
This is a metric that accounts for all the costs your company incurs while hiring new employees. It may include:
Internal hiring administrative and legal costs
Cost of job postings
Advertising costs
External recruiter fees
Travel expenses
Recruitment or hiring bonuses
Relocation costs
To calculate cost per hire, add up all costs in a time frame and divide it by the number of hires. This metric helps the company know how effective the hiring budget is being used, and where to make adjustments if the cost per hire is limiting the number of new employees you can add in a year.
The average cost per hire is $4,700, according to SHRM data. But some estimates come in as high as three to four times the total salary of the position your company is seeking to fill. It’s worth identifying areas to trim the overall cost.
Application Completion Rate
If your company uses an online application system, this metric can show how many candidates start but never finish the process. It can indicate bottlenecks in the application, or note if candidates consistently leave sections blank or seem to have insufficient space to answer questions. This metric allows you to make the appropriate edits so the application process is smooth for the applicant and provides the right amount of data for the company.
Offer Acceptance Rate
This metric helps you know the percentage of offers accepted by prospective employees. Considering that it always costs you something to make an offer, this metric is valuable in analyzing each step of the recruiting, interviewing, and offering process. If your company has a high initial response rate but a low offer acceptance rate, this may indicate:
Your job descriptions may be misleading about actual job responsibilities
Your interview process could be too long or too demanding
Your communication has some lag time that’s causing you to lose out on desirable hires
Quality of Hire
Once a prospective employee has been hired, analyzing metrics doesn’t need to stop. In the first few months of a new employee’s tenure, you can evaluate whether they are meeting the company’s standards. If you have a trial period, this can be a useful metric to determine whether you and the new employee are a good fit after all.
According to Indeed, “The basic calculation for quality of hire would work as follows: job performance score + social engagement score + productivity score / total number of factors = quality of hire.”
These criteria will vary from company to company, but a noticeable decline in quality of new hires can motivate you to examine the factors that lead to low productivity, for example. Can they be attributed to a point in the hiring process that could use some scrutiny? It’s better to address those issues long before hiring, onboarding, and a period of lesser quality work.
New Hire Turnover Rate
While analyzing quality of hire comes from the company side, turnover comes from the employee side. This metric shows how many new hires stay on for some defined period of time. If you’re seeing an unexpectedly high turnover rate, this can indicate:
Problems with onboarding
Confusion about or dissatisfaction with job responsibilities
Mismatch of employee to supervisor
Interview mistakes regarding skills or experience
Analyzing Hiring Metrics
Modern software makes gathering hiring metrics a breeze. A tool like ApplicantStack offers reports for a whole suite of data, allowing your company to track recruitment metrics with ease. These reports can provide great insight before a hiring push puts you in a bind.
A budget-conscious company is always looking to save on the bottom line, but the right metrics can do much more than just encourage an overall slash and cut. This data can give you insight if your recruiting spending is in the right places, and offer guidance to reallocate resources to actions offering you the most quality hires. Get access to the reports your company needs to track hiring metrics when you start your free trial.
Starting any new job is like drinking from a firehose for at least the first few days. Onboarding a new employee means a huge data dump of company values and culture, job responsibilities, department procedures, and all the administrative tasks of setting up payroll and benefits. Remote employees face an extra hurdle in that all of their onboarding has to be done through virtual or text communication. Still, there are plenty of ways to make the virtual onboarding process run smoothly for both employer and employee. Here are some of our best tips for remote onboarding.
Why Include Remote Employees in the Onboarding Process?
Research suggests that around 86 percent of employees decide whether to stay with the company within the first few months. That means the first introduction and subsequent few weeks of a new employee’s time is crucial to retention. Small businesses in particular may find that the onboarding process ends up taking a backseat to the crush of daily operations.
“You’ll figure it out” may cut it for some self-starters, but other remote workers might need a more deliberate and informative onboarding experience. With onboarding tools built into ApplicantStack, you can set up the process once and go through it with every new hire. Plus, all the paperwork and tasks can be done from anywhere, ensuring that remote employees have access.
Onboarding remote employees takes some extra finesse and attention. Having a new employee follow someone around the office can accomplish in a few hours what a day of virtual meetings can’t quite match. But that’s no reason to give up on giving a remote employee the best possible introduction to the company. It may require some creativity and organization, but the goal of retention and employee satisfaction is worth the effort. ApplicantStack allows you to upload forms, create tasks, generate e-sign documents, and access lots of other helpful tools.
The Basics of Remote Onboarding
Remote and in-person workers want the same things from their job: clearly laid-out responsibilities, pride in their work, recognition for achievement, and a good work-life balance. To make sure that a remote worker feels a part of the company’s mission from day one, they need to be warmly welcomed and provided all the tools that can help them accomplish their work.
A well-structured onboarding program for virtual workers includes:
A clear outline and schedule of activities, like required video conferences with estimated duration and participants, expectation of camera on or off, viewing of pre-recorded content, time set aside to study company documents, participation in chats, introductions to other employees, or a virtual tour of the office
Computers and other required technology in good working order, along with detailed instructions, pre-recorded videos, or live training to set up the equipment properly
Clear policies on required availability via devices: times of day, in periods of time-intensive projects, or weekends and holidays
Links to e-sign necessary administration documents with clear communication on deadlines and functional upload capability for IDs, etc.
Access to supervisors and human resources for questions
Tips for Improving the Virtual Onboarding Process
Since the pandemic changed the work landscape, companies of all sizes have learned to embrace the idea of remote work. Here are some tried and true ways small and large businesses can implement to help your new virtual employee immediately feel like part of the team:
Include supervisors and department heads in the process of developing your company’s onboarding process.
Determine how your existing employees’ time is best used. Does 1-2 full days of onboarding meetings make sense? Or do you set up a week’s worth of half-days to allow supervisors to attend to other work? An onboarding expert at LinkedIn said, “We felt we could best do [onboarding] with shorter bursts spread over a week to allow flexibility with working from home, and then we could adapt as needed.”
Allow for breaks. Employees can feel free to turn off their cameras and stretch, take a short walk, or attend to a personal task. Some companies send a gift card for a virtual lunch break.
Don’t make assumptions about proficiency levels in tech. Offer plentiful training about the software your company uses for an employee who may be coming from a fully in-person job.
Designate an onboarding mentor whom a new employee can ask questions privately, if needed. Introduce the new employee to the mentor early in the process and allow check-in time to clear up any confusion as it happens.
Ship a welcome basket along with a laptop and any other required tech items. Include some useful and some fun items, such as:
A printed copy of the employee handbook that includes information like company values and culture, clear explanations of perks and benefits, bonus or incentive policies, company leave and holidays, and mandatory work hours or meetings.
Logo swag like coffee or water cups, notebooks, pens and pencils, or a framed graphic of the company mission statement
Desk items like ring lights, mouse pads, faux plants, organizing supplies, decorative file folders, or cleaning supplies
Required and bonus tech equipment like a working laptop with one or two chargers, bluetooth headphones, microphones, an external monitor, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, or tablet
Virtual Onboarding Follow-Up
The Kevin Eikenberry Group, a consultancy group, looked at research from Queens University in Canada regarding long-distance relationships. They suggest that some of the data can help managers with the onboarding process and first few weeks for remote workers. After a set amount of time, supervisors should check in with remote workers and assess mutually-agreed upon benchmarks.
Does your remote worker feel like a valuable part of the team?
Do they feel like boundaries of availability via tech are respected?
Were they supplied with all the relevant information from the beginning or have they been blindsided with new data?
Do they feel comfortable bringing up concerns and asking for clarification?
Are supervisors available and responsive?
Many businesses operate now with a combination of in-person and remote workers. Productivity and retention can often be determined by the quality of your onboarding process. A tool like ApplicantStack can help you organize your onboarding process for best success with remote workers.
Gearing up for a new year often comes with setting goals and looking toward the future. If your small business is growing (or you’d like it to be), hiring may play a key role in 2024. Explore our guide to preparing for recruiting needs this coming year.
Assess Current Strengths and Weaknesses
Before you decide what positions you want to create or fill, take a moment to assess the current strengths and weaknesses of your team. Identify what skills your employees have and which ones might be lacking. Could existing team members take on additional responsibility after completing training and development? If so, you might be able to put off hiring a new employee, at least for a while.
Identify Positions that Need to be Filled
With a firm grasp on what the team is doing well and where improvements could happen, you can create a list of roles that need to be filled. Maybe you’re creating additional positions on your sales team to fuel growth, or perhaps your goals involve establishing more brand awareness with a bigger marketing team. You could even need to create a new department to provide support or additional resources.
Dig Up Job Descriptions
Now that you have a list of what roles you need to hire for in 2024, you can start prepping for the recruiting process. If you’re backfilling an existing position, the job description may be out there somewhere. Try to find it, but don’t just throw it onto job boards immediately. Instead, review the content and determine whether everything is still accurate.
A job description is often the first interaction a jobseeker will have with your company, so it’s important to make a positive impression. Instead of listing out bulleted responsibilities and skills, why not spice it up a bit and make it more interesting to the reader? Include information about the company culture and what someone can expect when working in this role.
You can also use templates to further simplify this process. It’s easy to create and store description templates within ApplicantStack, a powerful recruiting and onboarding platform built for small business needs.
Jazz Up Your Online Presence
Today’s jobseekers are more interested in finding jobs that are the right fit, so they’re spending more time looking at companies to ensure alignment. If your website is outdated or your social media accounts are gathering dust, take some time to jazz them up. Create or update your careers page to emphasize what you’re looking for when it comes to new members of the team, and leverage social media to get in front of a wider audience.
Improve Your Hiring Process
If you ask hiring managers and small business owners what they dislike about hiring, aspects of the process will likely come up. For many organizations, the process of finding and bringing on talent is clunky, slow, and frustrating. But as 2024 kicks off, why not make it easier on yourself and everyone else involved?
Implement an applicant-tracking system that keeps everyone on the same page. ApplicantStack is affordable yet packed with features, including job posting and communication tools that make hiring easier for all. Plus, you can utilize the onboarding functionality when you find your top talent and they accept your offer.
Learn more about ApplicantStack and how it can help you ramp up your hiring efforts in 2024. Try it for free or take a quick tour to see how it works.
At the start of 2023, we covered some of the expected hiring trends throughout the year. Now, we’re taking a look back to see which of those trends impacting hiring efforts for employers. Dive into the hiring challenges faced by recruiters and managers in 2023 as we prepare to start a new year.
2023 Hiring Trends
We mentioned internal movement as an expected trend, and that was certainly a thing in 2023. Internal mobility is a significant factor in employee retention and loyalty, so creating and offering opportunities for existing team members to advance are essential in your strategy. Contract or gig work also expanded substantially this year, with approximately 59 million people in the U.S. working in such roles. The demand surged significantly, and by 2027, it’s estimated that over 85 million Americans will perform some type of gig work.
Company culture remains an influential factor in the hiring market. It’s becoming more and more challenging for workplaces with toxic or unsupportive atmospheres to bring on and retain top talent. Investing in culture is a must for a business, regardless of size, to improve hiring efforts. Another trend was identifying ways to allow employees to integrate their personal and professional lives, rather than just separating and balancing them.
Challenges in Hiring This Year
Recruiters and hiring managers faced unique challenges associated with these trends and economic swings in 2023.
Finding top talent
One of the most commonly discussed difficulties was finding quality candidates. Intense competition and low unemployment rates contributed to this challenge, which plagued employers of all sizes. However, small businesses tend to struggle the most with finding top talent, as they may have trouble getting their open positions in front of a wider audience. The right applicant-tracking system can make this easier, with tools to share job descriptions to hundreds of sites with a single click.
Training and skills gaps
It’s hard to keep employees engaged and happy if they don’t feel like their employer is investing in their growth and development. Skills and training gaps are significant issues in workplaces that haven’t made learning and development a priority. When these elements are lacking, people often look elsewhere, resulting in higher employer turnover rates.
Unpredictability in the job market
The economy has played a serious role in hiring and growth efforts among businesses of all sizes and across all industries. Instability and unpredictability have resulted in fewer people looking elsewhere for work, instead choosing to remain where they are to feel more stable. Layoffs in many industries have forced others into the job market, requiring creativity and adaptability among those responsible for filling open positions.
Younger jobseeker preferences
If your hiring tactics are geared toward baby boomers or millennials, you may be having trouble attracting younger jobseekers. Members of Gen Z expect their workplaces to prioritize digital communication and collaboration, and this expectation starts with the hiring process. Without a proven solution in place that simplifies the hiring process, your company likely won’t get in front of Gen Z applicants.
The best tool for overcoming these and other challenges impacting hiring managers and recruiters is an applicant-tracking system. ApplicantStack aligns with your needs while fitting into your small-business budget. Explore how this hiring and recruiting system can help you take your efforts to the next level and build strong teams, despite the difficulties.
With Thanksgiving coming up, you may be thinking about what you’re thankful for and how those things impact your life. But as a small business owner, it’s worth considering your recruiting process and how it impacts the organization’s ability to grow and succeed. In this article, we’re outlining the benefits of improving how you bring on new hires and why those are worth giving thanks for this holiday season.
Understanding the Onboarding Process
Onboarding is a term that includes all the tasks associated with bringing a new onboard into your organization. It begins when someone accepts an offer, and you start planning for their arrival on the team. Examples of onboarding activities include new-hire orientation, training, support from a mentor, and even a tour of the office or workspace.
Orientation is an important aspect of a new hire’s first day, but it differs from onboarding. When you think about orienting someone to a new role, your mind might imagine stacks of paperwork and an introduction to the company mission and values.
But onboarding goes a step further than orientation, as its purpose is to help a new employee feel comfortable and confident in their new role. This comprehensive process can take up to a year to fully complete, and it should involve many people throughout the company.
Every new hire goes through some type of onboarding process but a more robust experience can have a significant positive impact on retention and satisfaction. Gallup data shows that only 12 percent of employees felt good about their onboarding experience.
Additionally, those in that group were three times more likely to report that they have the best possible job. Less than a third of new hires surveyed felt supported and prepared to excel in a new role. These statistics indicate plenty of room for improvement.
5 Reasons to Give Thanks for Better Onboarding
Now, let’s dive into some of the reasons to give thanks for improved onboarding.
Positive employee experience
In today’s economy, it’s more important than ever to provide a positive experience for your employees. People have more options when it comes to finding work, especially in positions and industries that require fewer skills. Make sure your new hires feel supported and excited about their future with your organization by investing in a positive onboarding process.
Improved engagement
Engagement is one of the most essential aspects of managing a workforce. Engaged employees work harder, are more productive, and contribute significantly to the success of a business. But unfortunately, only 33 percent of American employees report being engaged, and 16 percent report being actively disengaged.
A new hire’s first experience with how your organization engages with them occurs during the recruiting and hiring process. But onboarding also plays a role in the overall experience, which has a direct correlation to engagement.
Enhanced retention
Retaining top talent can be a real challenge but onboarding may be the secret sauce your company is currently not using. Nearly 70 percent of employees are more likely to stick around with an organization if they had a great onboarding experience. When you compare that stat with the overall cost of bringing on a new hire, you can see just how important onboarding is in retention efforts.
Increased productivity
A successful onboarding process can reduce the learning curve for new hires, helping them to feel more confident in their roles. As a result, they can get up and running faster, which means they’re more productive. Great onboarding can also minimize how long it takes to become proficient with different tasks and responsibilities.
Supportive company culture
Regardless of the size of your business, you should recognize the value of building a supportive and positive culture. And employees need to understand the culture and what to expect from the moment they consider working for your organization.
Providing a positive and consistent onboarding process for every new hire goes hand-in-hand with the culture you want to build and cultivate. By contrast, high turnover rates contribute to a toxic culture, making it difficult to get good people to stick around.
ApplicantStack Can Take Your Efforts to the Next Level
Are you already giving thanks for these benefits of better onboarding? Or, could your company’s process still use some work? With ApplicantStack, a powerful hiring and onboarding solution built for small business, you can maximize your efforts without overspending.
This budget-friendly platform is ideal for creating consistency and providing support to new hires being brought on board. Learn more by taking a brief video-based tour.
