iCIMS Hire Expectations™

The intent of the HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) initiative is to provide a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives on hospital care. This initiative in healthcare recruiting has become an essential part of our hiring practice. If ever there was a time to hardwire a culture of excellent patient care—to ensure that your organization is meeting its mission, protecting its bottom line, and enhancing its reputation—that time has clearly arrived.

Identifying the right skill set is not always the most important factor in hiring the right candidate. What is important is asking if this candidate will fit into one’s culture. Will they change the way a patient receives care?  Identifying the right behaviors that attribute to higher HCAHPS scores become the challenge today. Competences like ‘compassion, adaptability, multi-tasking, and flexibility’ are important behaviors to evaluate for HCAHPS, especially when it comes to nursing candidates.

The Studer Group released an article on “Four Reasons Why Those 27 Survey Questions Will Change Healthcare Forever.”

• HCAHPS provides accurate “apples to apples” metrics.

• Results are tied to quality and clinical outcomes.

• It gives consumers an easy way to compare hospitals.

• HCAHPS pay-for-performance is coming

Identifying these competencies allow a recruiter to screen candidates in a way that hiring managers will understand the true value you deliver to them during an interview process. Hospitals need employees who understand the importance of patient centric care.

To be at your best as a top Healthcare recruiter, you must understand how to impact the HCAHPs scores indirectly. Here are a few bullets to help link these together.

•  Take the time to learn what is measured. 

•  Know your organizations scores and where you are falling short. 

•    During your candidate screening, ensure you are asking questions that revolve around specific survey questions. For example: How do you treat patients with courtesy and respect? Give me examples of how you’ve changed your communication style depending on the patient/situation? How do you explain medications and treatment to patients and their families?

•  Communicate your strategy to peers, hiring managers, and executives

•  Always share your success

The question now lies, how will HCAHPS scores transform the way you select top talent? 

Today's blog post comes to you from a Ready Prep Interview Representative!

When it comes down to it, the primary purpose of the interviewing process is to gain assurance that whoever you hire can do the job successfully.  A situational job interview consists of a series of questions focused on drawing out the actual experience a candidate has in demonstrating the specific qualities or skills that are required to do the job. The theory behind the situational job interview is that a candidate’s past performance is one of the best indicators of future performance.

While not rocket science, here are 3 tips that will help you conduct great situational interviews and as a result hire the best candidate for the position.

Ask the Right Questions
Create a list of the qualities and skills required to do the job you are looking to fill. One of the best places to start is the job description you have created for the position.  Verify your list with current employees who hold the same position or other employees who will work with the candidate you hire.

Once you have a good list of qualities and skills required to do the job, translate them into a list of interview questions that ask for situations where the candidate has demonstrated the skill or quality.  For example, if the candidate needs to be able to accept criticism on a regular basis, you might ask “Share a time when you have received criticism about your work. What was the situation and how did you handle it?”

One resource that will help you identify questions you should consider asking is Ready Prep Interview, a website that hosts thousands of job specific situational job interview questions. Once you find the position you are interviewing for, the questions are already sorted by the importance of the quality or skill being tested so you can simply start at the top and work your way down.

Require Detailed Responses
As you already know, some candidates are better at interviewing than others. One of the most common mistakes I see a candidate make is when a candidate just tells the interviewer what he or she wants to hear instead of a real situation.  For example, when asked to provide a situation when their ethics were tested, the candidate may respond by saying that honesty is an important value to them.  As an interviewer, this doesn’t tell you much. Anyone can say that. The candidate’s response won’t help you choose them over another candidate.  Especially if another candidate gives you a detailed situation of when their ethics were tested and how they overcame it.

Don’t let a candidate’s inexperience with interviewing get in the way of you hiring them. The key is to not let your candidates off the hook too easily. Push for specific examples. Feel free to ask for details. Give your candidates every chance to provide detailed examples of how they have demonstrated the skills and qualities you are looking for.

Be Consistent and Take Good Notes
While you may want to vary some of your questions based on a candidate’s level of experience, the bulk of the questions you ask should be used for all candidates applying to the same position. The consistency will help you objectively compare one candidate to another.  If you take good notes about each response a candidate gives, you will be able to refer back to your notes when making your decision. I have found that even brief notes will help me recall my impressions about the candidate. This is especially helpful if when I interview several candidates over a relatively long period of time.

The situational job interview is a great tool to help you hire the right candidate for the job.  Ask the right questions, force your candidates to give you details, and consistently ask the same questions to each of your candidates. Follow these tips and you will get the most out of your situational job interviews.

I was recently chatting with some HR professionals regarding the age-old question over whether active or passive candidates are better recruits. In my opinion, the recruiters preferring passive won the debate. Their argument was simply a matter of control. Sourcing for passive candidates puts the recruiter in the driver’s seat as they look for candidates with specific experience and/or skill sets.

Obviously there were other reasons why recruiters prefer passive candidates, but this was the most compelling (and the idea that prompted this post). When one realizes the value of recruiting passive candidates, the question becomes how to find the best passive candidates with the least time investment. Applying most sourcing methods, recruiters are rummaging through resumes on major job boards or spending hours searching LinkedIn.  These methods are great, but not necessarily efficient when resumes are old or potential candidates do not reply.

What’s the best way to find the strongest passive candidates, you ask? That is a great question with a very simple answer… compile and then source from your own talent pool of ‘warm’ candidates.

So, how does one compile and source their ‘own’ pool of warm candidates beyond searching LinkedIn contacts?

To answer this, let’s start by defining warm candidates. A warm candidate is, at the very least, aware of your company’s employment brand.  It is pretty obvious that the most efficient use of your time will be to focus on the warm candidates rather than pursuing those who are just not interested. You must keep in mind, LinkedIn contacts are not necessarily warm passive candidates by this definition. 

Keeping your talent pool warm is a little like dating. Your talent pool is your ‘little black book’. But, just because a person is in the little black book, it is not a guarantee that they will remember you. To keep candidates warm, you must stay in contact with them. Drop them a line every once in a while and show them the best of your employment brand through some old fashion marketing nurture campaigns. Basically, ‘date’ them.

The next step is to compile a talent pool full of warm candidates. How does one accomplish that? First, consider all the candidates that are already in your ATS. Perhaps, they were not a good match in the past, but maybe as time has gone by their skills or education have advanced. These candidates have expressed interest in the past and therefore they are warm candidates.

In addition to what you already have in your ATS, you absolutely must open the door wide to new talent.  To do this, your company’s career page should encourage potential candidates to submit their information even when jobs matching the candidate’s skills are not currently available.  Next, consider all those people you meet at job fairs, networking, and career development events. Even if you don’t have openings that match their skills right now, you will eventually. Any time you meet someone that seems to possess talents, skills, or experience that may eventually be useful to you, take the opportunity to talk up your employment brand (without being too much like an overly aggressive recruiter) and ask to exchange contact information, just in case.

To further develop your talent pool, encourage current employees to recommend friends or former colleagues based on talents. Make sure that current employees understand that you are interested in more than just who is currently looking for a job – you want traits, talent, and passion vs. simple availability. For example, ask employees, “who do you know that that has great project management or communication skills?” That will get the employee thinking more broadly. 
 
In short, there is a lot you can do to compile and source from your own pool of warm talent. The most important factors are simply this:  First, allow interested parties to send their resume or contact information to you – even when you are not actively recruiting their particular skill/experience. Finally, when the warm candidates start coming in – keep them warm by recommending opportunities or simply showcasing your brand. The biggest mistake a sourcing pro can make is to let talent slip through their fingers because they are not thinking in terms of future recruiting needs.

It’s that season again when the fall colors are on display. In addition to the typical autumnal oranges and yellows, this year – being an election year – also offers plenty of red, white, and blue. At the end of the season, we are left with both raking up the leaves and removing our political opinions from our front yards.

As the news media and other organizations vet the candidates’ history and experience, we are left to decide what is important and what can be ignored. Although the type of information and the origin is different for political candidates than it is for employee candidates, what is similar is the challenge of effectively processing what you hear, see and believe. Unlike the political process, in the world of human resources HR professionals have to deal with the employment law, EEOC guidance, I-9 verification, etc. Employers should first consider the EEOC guidance when reviewing background check information that could be used to make a negative hiring decision. Here are a few things employers should keep in mind when analyzing a candidate’s background check:

1.The facts or circumstances surrounding the offense or conduct.
2.The number of offenses for which the individual was convicted.
3.Older age at the time of conviction, or release from prison.
4.Evidence that the individual performed the same type of work, post-conviction with the same or a different employer, with no known incidents of criminal conduct.
5.The length and consistency of employment history before and after the offense or conduct. 
6.Rehabilitation efforts, e.g., education/training. 
7.Employment or character references and any other information regarding fitness for the particular position
8.Whether the individual is bonded under a federal, state, or local bonding program

Although the EEOC guidelines can be viewed as another hurdle for the HR professional it does not need to suspend pragmatic thinking. As a matter of fact, adjudication tools to assist a company with these steps are now standard in the industry.

Now back to the political season. Wouldn’t it be great if our political polls used the same red, yellow and green process we typically see in the workplace?

Well maybe extravaganza is the wrong word, but perhaps it isn’t too far off.  On 27 September, UK Recruiter is hosting a Recruitment Software and Innovative Technologies Showcase event for HR in-house and agency recruiters to help them find the best tool to bring their recruitment to the next level. Well, the timing couldn’t be better!

According to Financial Times, UK employment is the strongest it has been in nearly four years. The article states that employment showed strong growth, with the level up 236,000 on the quarter to 29.56m, which is the largest quarterly rise seen in the past two years. While the Olympics did contribute to that increase, some economists feel that the growth was still an improvement in the long run.

As we all know, positive employment rates often translate into more vacancies! If the number of vacancies increases – it’s time for recruiters to get to work. In order to recruit effectively and efficiently, recruiters need to ensure that their processes are in tip-top shape so time-to-fill and quality-of-hire can be optimized when positions need to be filled. Without proper procedures in place, these two metrics will suffer tremendously. The best way to do this is to automate the manual processes that contribute to inefficiencies within the department.

Now, let’s get back to information about the event on 27 September. If you are a recruiter looking to optimize processes by automating time-consuming tasks, you should definitely attend this event. As an attendee, you will learn about products from many technology companies in order to find the solution that fits your needs. And, don’t forget to check out iCIMS. Search for the banner full of birds!

Last week, iCIMS formally announced a new and exciting partnership with Workopolis, the largest online recruitment provider in Canada. Each time the company enters into a partner relationship with any outside vendor much thought and consideration is put into how clients will be impacted. With the Workopolis decision, iCIMS saw this vendor as an ideal candidate to work alongside based on the shared values that both companies are committed to delivering including ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability. The alignment is particularly fitting as both organizations successfully serve companies of all sizes, from small businesses to enterprise clients.

Now, let’s discuss how everyone will benefit from this relationship! First, iCIMS will now be able to leverage the power of the Workopolis brand in Canada, with Workopolis becoming the exclusive Canadian distributor of the iCIMS Talent Platform and its related solutions and services. To bring this arrangement full circle for Workopolis, the iCIMS Talent Platform will replace the existing “1.0” ATS that is currently being provided to Workopolis customers. Both iCIMS and Workopolis are capitalizing on one another’s best-of-breed abilities to take their individual organizations to the next level.  iCIMS will be more visible in the Canadian marketplace and Workopolis will obtain the innovative 2.0 talent acquisition functionality that the company needs to ensure that customers can stay ahead of the competition in the war for top talent. Both organizations are receiving a boost to their credibility as leaders in the talent acquisition world.

While each company is greatly anticipating what the future will hold as the two recruitment technology experts join forces, let’s not forget about the clients. Now that iCIMS will be providing products to larger number of Canadian clients, the company is creating a Canadian data center. Additionally, iCIMS is in the process of establishing French language support. Furthermore, existing customers will be seeing tighter integrations between the iCIMS’ Talent Platform and Workopolis Jobs.

Overall, this partnership was put in place as a way for each company to utilize the other’s strengths and allow them to continue providing a best-of-breed experience to clients. For more information regarding iCIMS’ partnership with Workopolis, please click here to read the press release.

The customer is always right – especially when it comes to what they want to see in the product they use every day. In this case that product is the iCIMS Talent Platform, and iCIMS has always been committed to taking our clients ideas and feedback, and turning them into our newest features. While our annual surveys, client user groups, Product Experience Panel, and daily interactions with clients help us garner an idea of our clients are looking for, iCIMS has also created the Customer Advisory Council (CAC) – a two day conference held each year where an elite group of clients get together with the iCIMS team to discuss ideas and improvements for the system as well as upcoming trends in HR.

This Monday, September 10th marks the start of iCIMS’ 9th Annual Customer Advisory Council . The CAC gives us the ability to work face to face with both everyday users in the system and their executives to not only hear what new features they would like to see, but also things that they feel might not be working to their full potential. It’s a simple, proactive way to keep a pulse on how clients are using the system, ways that we can better the user and candidate experience, and share with our clients where iCIMS is headed as a company.

This year’s CAC is slated to allow for even more free flowing conversation between clients and iCIMS employees. With the largest CAC head count to date, new conference tracks, smaller break-out sessions, and one-on-one meetings all being hosted at iCIMS’ brand new HQ in Matawan NJ, we can’t wait to see the feedback we gain!

As a Marketing professional at a company that produces technology for Human Resources professionals, I’m coming to realize that Marketing and HR have a lot in common. At the end of the day, we’re both selling something – Marketing is selling a product or service, while HR is selling an employment opportunity. There are certain techniques that are revolutionizing the field of Marketing, and I believe that HR can embrace some of these tools to gain an advantage when it comes to recruiting.

To begin, let’s take a look at the foundation of marketing: the marketing mix, also known as the 4 Ps.

1.Product: An item that satisfies a consumer want or need; either a good or service.
2.Price: The amount the consumer pays for the product.
3.Promotion: The methods of communication used to provide information about the    product.
4.Place: The distribution channels through which the product is provided for    consumers to access.

Now let’s translate this to HR:

1.Product (Opportunity): The position, culture, and employment brand you offer to    candidates.
2.Price (Value): The compensation package you’re extending to the right candidate.
3.Promotion (Communication): The communication you use to recruit and source    candidates.
4.Place (Recruitment Channel): The channels through which you broadcast your    opportunities.

Cover the Basics with Product & Price

You may not have an abundance of control over your “product” and your “price,” since the job descriptions and salaries will be dictated in large part by Hiring Managers and budgets. However, you do have control over your company culture, your employment brand, and some of the peripheral benefits of working at your organization (the “perks” of the job – game rooms, free food, etc.).

Build a strong company culture predicated upon shared values and a strong mission, and clearly articulate it to potential candidates on your corporate career site and social media accounts. Take advantage of images and video to brand these properties, and give candidates a glimpse inside your organization. Show candidates what it’s like to work for your company, and how they’d fit in.

Stand out from the Crowd with Promotion & Place

Marketing has developed a wide variety of tools to promote products. HR has adopted some of these methods, but in my opinion, they can expand upon these tactics by taking advantage of the channels and techniques that are currently revolutionizing Marketing: social, mobile, search, and automation.

Social: By now, it should go without saying that HR should take advantage of social networks for recruitment. LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are all prime locations for finding candidates for jobs, and there are tools available that make it easy to get the word out about your opportunities. Make sure your job postings are social-optimized to allow for easy sharing, and make it easy for candidates to follow you and receive updates from your company.

Mobile: It’s estimated that by 2015 more people will access the internet via a mobile device than via a desktop computer. It’s important to mobile-optimize your career site to provide a seamless experience for job-seekers searching on mobile devices. Make it easy for candidates to find relevant jobs, regardless of how they’re accessing your career site.

Search: There is so much information out there; it’s hard to make sense of it all. Do your candidates a favor, and make it easy for them to find your opportunities. Search engines index millions of pages of job-related data, so you need to make sure your candidates can find your jobs easily. Make sure your jobs and career sites are search engine optimized so they show up on page one search results, allowing candidates to come straight to your career site (thus cutting out the job board middleman).

Automation: Nurture your candidates through automated communication campaigns that target them when the time is right. If you’re using a robust sourcing solution, you can build Talent Pools that you can enter directly into “drip” email campaigns that use logic to send communications at a determined interval. You can also set logic to send communications to certain pools when a relevant opportunity opens up.

In anticipation of iCIMS’ 9th annual Customer Advisory Council, our team conducted a study to identify where clients were having the most success finding and hiring qualified applicants.

In order to provide the most current and comprehensive data, we analyzed our 1,200+ clients’ source effectiveness reports. These reports assess recruitment advertising sources and the volume of candidates coming from each. Additionally, the report highlights the quality of such sources by displaying where candidates were in the recruitment process by source (ie: Did a lot of candidates come from a given source, but all were automatically disqualified?). On the flip side, the reports show if certain sources produce candidates who move farther along in the process. We pulled 12 months of candidate source data from August 2011 through July of 2012 that was accurately tracked by leveraging the automated source tracking feature of the iCIMS platform. This feature takes away the risk of candidates falsely identifying their source by automatically locking in the true origin of candidate to ensure accurate reporting. The organization’s that benefit from the iCIMS platform range in size from companies of 10 employees, to global corporations well over 100,000; ensuring our report was applicable for a full range of organizations. Combined, the data provided insight from over 1 million job postings, 25 million applicants, and 285,299 hires.

This is the first time that iCIMS has taken an in-depth look at just where our clients are finding their new hires. We believe, at iCIMS, that this will provide a great deal of valuable information for those clients. Of the 285,299 hires, 29% came from external sources; the other 71% came from referrals, internal hires, company career sites, and undefined sources. This is extremely exciting news because this confirms that iCIMS clients are better leveraging the tools at their disposal to make jobs visible via their corporate and in-house portals, as well as through employee referrals to bring in qualified applicants.

Though we are thrilled to see a high number of new hires coming in from these types of sources, the data also reveals the impact of external sources in the hiring process. Of the identified external sources of hire, Indeed.com, CareerBuilder, Monster, Craigslist, Linkedin, and Simply Hired, emerged as the top branded external sources of hire with sources such 3rd party recruiting agencies,  job fairs, and campus recruiting also making the list. Indeed alone accounted for more hires than all other branded sources combined and stood far out from the pack, delivering 77% more hires than the second highest external source.

As iCIMS ramps up for our advisory council, we are extremely excited to share and discuss this useful data with our client base, combined with the new and exciting features our roadmap provides for the coming year. Our clients will be given invaluable tips on how to fully incorporate both the new functionality and research findings to optimize their recruitment strategy overall.

We may not be proud of it, but even the best of us get hooked on really bad reality TV shows. Most recently I found myself glued to Remodeled – a show that stars modeling industry veteran Paul Fisher, who’s planning to bring together hundreds of small modeling agencies around the world in a new venture called The Network.  His mission is to make sure modeling agents in small towns see success and empower models in their careers. 

In the last episode Paul ventured to Columbus, Ohio to bring an outdated family run agency into the 21st century and embrace high fashion. At the end of the episode, the agency in Ohio went from looking like a family room to a high fashion agency space with the help of a little reimaging and improved process.

You’re probably wondering where I’m going with this – but there was something distinct that caught my eye that’s translatable in so many facets of business – including HR. Being successful in carving out an image for your company involves gaining control and understanding the image you want to project to gain the talent you need. On top of your image, it’s the processes you put in place that help maintain the image. Together, this helps support the employer brand in a way that’s not just skin deep.

While we may not be in the industry of finding the next Cindy Crawford, we are in the business of finding top talent and like it or not – the image your organization projects on the World Wide Web speaks volumes of what it’s like to work at your company. With mobile technology use continuing to rise, candidates can easily gather information on what it’s like to work at your company either through blogs, forums, or directly from you.

The good news is that you can leverage technology to ensure that the image and communications you want to project make their way to the right people. Using applicant tracking software supported with tools like search engine optimization and social distribution, your company can get to the right audience and increase the depth of your networks with word of mouth referrals.  As new hires are brought onboard, onboarding software can help reinforce a standard process and your message, while ensuring you remind the new recruit of why they decided to join your organization.

While Paul of Remodeled may not be scheduled to visit your headquarters in the near future, it’s always good practice to reevaluate processes and ensure you’re effective and deliberate in projecting your employer brand to both candidates and new recruits. With so many tools available to help serve as a vehicle for your message and to reinforce the bones behind it – it’s up to you to take the first steps and discover the possibilities!