by Steven Lindner | Jul 29, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Talent Acquisition |
The June 2015 job report – showing 223,000 new jobs created in June and a 5.3% national unemployment rate at a 7-year low – was great news for those who have been job hunting 1. But for companies that need to hire new employees, these numbers are creating new challenges to find the perfect candidate.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the declining unemployment rate is not just a result of job creation, but also owed in part to a decline in the number of people looking for work. Indeed, the labor-force participation rate 2, or the share of the population working or looking for a job, marked a 38-year low at 62.6%. According to Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch, this is a combination of baby boomers hitting retirement (the bigger factor) and other people who have given up trying to get a job. The percentage of those who aren’t in the labor force and who want a job, at 7.1% in June 2015, is only slightly higher than the 6.8% rate in June 2007, before the onset of the Great Recession. 3
Juggling Time to Hire with Quality of Hire
Finding that perfect candidate is becoming increasingly more difficult and employers are feeling heightened pressure to fill job openings. As the job market tightens, time-to-hire increases. In a study conducted by Glassdoor.com, in comparison to 2010, the average time-to-hire has increased by 10.3 days.4 With time-to-hire being an important recruiting metric, the pressure to hire less-than-ideal candidates is compounded when fewer job candidates exist. In an effort to avoid having positions vacant for too long, employers are frequently tempted to hire less-than-ideal candidates despite the long term implications.
Making poor hiring decisions by hiring less-than-ideal candidates can wind up costing companies much more in the end than holding out for the right hires. In Recruiting Budgets: Is it Money Well Spent? Googles Vice President of People Operations, Lazlo Bock shares that [Google] spends twice as much of its people budget hiring [recruiting budget] than the average company guided by the philosophy that the better job Google does to begin with, the fewer resources will have to be spent rehabilitating underachievers or replacing people who dont work out.
So what does all this mean for employers trying to recruit candidates?
As the market becomes more challenging, more creative candidate sourcing strategies are needed. Recruiters need to reach deeper into the labor pool, cast wider nets, and ensure they reach across recruitment channels to connect with candidates for both current and future talent needs. Employers also need to re-think the essential elements of their ideal candidate profiles.
Casting your line deeper and farther: Recruiting Outside the Box
As recruiters reach deeper and farther into the talent pool, building candidate communities that connect with your employment brand is one way to get ahead of the curve and avoid being myopically focused on just todays openings. Recruiters also need to connect the dots to new career paths for candidates as well as consider qualifications based on aptitudes and indicators of job success other than prior experience. For example, target candidates who have transferable skills. Candidates are frequently attracted to opportunities that help them transition into new career paths or industries. For positions offering training programs (like tech support and customer service) companies may also consider hiring individuals based on trainability rather than prior experience.
An initial step in this kind of candidate sourcing and selection is identifying what skills-can be pragmatically trained versus those skills and core knowledge that candidates need to have in order to benefit from your training. For example, its relatively easy to train employees on how to use a specific computer program or the ins and outs of your industry or companys offerings. In contrast, advanced programming skills or core engineering knowledge are much more challenging to tackle. Putting longer training programs in place can help compensate for a lack of industry or job knowledge, provided of course, all other qualities and competencies already exist.
Perhaps the most frequently passed over pool of untapped candidates exists among the underemployed. There are millions of working professionals employed in jobs that are below their skill levels. Included in this underemployed job segment are part-time workers who are actually in need of full-time jobs. Although the number of new jobs in the last few years has increased, the majority of those jobs are at the entry and low-experience level. Therefore, many of those laid off at the start or during the recession have, by necessity, been re-employed in positions that underutilize their skills and experience. For example, someone who held a Director-level position pre-recession may now be working as a manager. Identifying Underemployed Workers provides specific tips on how to find great talent among the underemployed.
Rabbit and the Turtle: Both have value in recruiting
In a tightening labor market, balancing hiring well with hiring fast is ever more difficult to achieve. The tendency is to tilt us towards selecting those we may not have hired a year or two ago. However that may not be a bad thing if it leads you to dig deeper, expanding your sourcing efforts, developing candidate communities and offering candidates opportunities they would not otherwise be able to have with you. In fact, when done well, it leads you to perfect candidates you would have ordinarily missed.
For more information about how to develop and utilize creative sourcing and selection strategies in your recruiting efforts, please contact us here at The WorkPlace Group.
References
1 Morath, Eric (July 2, 2015). Jobs at a Crossroads: Hiring Up, Pay Flat. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-report-u-s-payrolls-climb-by-223-000-1435840430)
2 Timiraos, Nick (July 2, 2015). The June Jobs Report in 10 Charts. The Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/02/the-june-jobs-report-in-10-charts/)
3 Goldstein, Steve. (July 2, 2015). Labor-force participation drops to lowest level since 1977. MarketWatch. https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=Economy.US&articleid=201507021020MRKTWTCHNEWS_SVC000271&IMG=N)
4 Dill, Kathryn (June 22, 2015). Study Confirms The American Hiring Process Is Now 10.3 Days Longer. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryndill/2015/06/22/study-confirms-the-american-hiring-process-is-now-10-3-days-longer/
5Image by http://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/hiring-and-recruiting/checklist-evaluating-job-candidates
by Steven Lindner | Jun 29, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics |
showcased an interview with Googles Vice President of People Operations, Lazlo Bock. In his book Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead,” Bock shares insider details and anecdotes from how Google has managed to become the number one Best Company to Work For, according to a Forbes Magazine study over the past six years.
In this interview, Bock states that [Google] spends twice as much of its people budget hiring [recruiting budget] than the average company guided by the philosophy that the better job Google does to begin with, the fewer resources will have to be spent rehabilitating underachievers or replacing people who dont work out. The WorkPlace Group shares Bocks view and has seen this to be true in many of our client companies as well. An up-front investment in good recruiting and selection avoids wasting dollars and time on corrective training, performance improvement and terminations, not to mention mishaps in serving customers and the cost to re-hire and replace employees who did not work out. To do this, requires a recruiting budget that can support this objective. Simply put, smarter recruiting and selection helps prevent the wrong candidate from being hired.
Spend Now, Save Later
Minimizing recruiting and selection costs [your recruiting budgets], intuitively, makes business sense. Great businesses keep their operating costs low to maximize their profit margins. Since Recruitment and Talent Acquisition functions are typically considered a cost center rather than a revenue driver to the business, recruiting managers are often challenged and incentivized to reduce costs [minimize their recruiting budgets] and do more with less.
In recruiting, the cost-per-hire metric has become the industry standard for evaluating recruitment costs and forecasting their recruiting budgets. The cost-per-hire metric tells us the average cost to hire an employee. Its derived by dividing the total amount spent on recruiting activities (e.g., your annual recruiting budget + recruiting costs paid out from budgets held by other departments) by the number of hires made. (The Society for Human Resource Management has published an American National Standard on how to calculate the cost-per-hire metric. Click here to download your copy)
While keeping recruiting budgets lean makes business sense, we cannot lose sight of the fact that great businesses need Great People. In fact, investors including the sharks on Shark Tank state that they invest more in the people running the business than the business itself. As Kevin OLeary states people are everything.
If people are everything, then why do we commoditize a companys efforts to identify, attract and select great talent? Shouldnt we focus more on the business value of those we hire rather than what it costs to hire them? If Mr. Bock worked as a recruitment director for most other companies, he might have received a negative appraisal on his costs per hire and recruiting budget. In fact, he would have probably been required to significantly cut his recruiting budget.
Success: Firsthand
True to Lazlo Bocks work at Google, we have been an instrumental part of several success stories where our clients increased their recruiting budget in order to achieve meaningful business results and positive ROIs. One such example was documented by our client in an HRO Today article, Thirsting for a Recruitment Solution.
The Honickman Group, as a result of their recruitment partnership with The WorkPlace Group saw openings get filled quicker, vacancies that used to haunt the company during peak seasons no longer left empty, and the overall quality of the candidates markedly improved. The Senior Vice-President of Human Resources stated, Clearly, our costs are higher, but the savings from filled positions more than paid for themselves. By implementing a structured outsourced process, the company was able to hire superior employees due to more accurate job descriptions and better assessment tools, and their time to fill these positions was cut in half. The higher quality of these new hires, in turn, helped the company better retain its customers. The additional dollars spent in their recruiting budget was going to be covered by reduced turnover, higher quality candidates, and retained accounts that would have been lost by not serving them properly, said the Senior Vice-President of HR.
Investing in Recruiting Pays Dividends
Bocks principle for recruiting boils down to one thing: your more valuable recruitment metric is quality of hire-not cost-per-hire. Though it may require higher recruiting budgets to recruit quality candidates, the up-front costs are well worth it. Hiring the right talent not only saves time and dollars in fixing bad hiring decisions, more importantly, it drives business growth and revenue.
For more information on how smart recruiting can drive business value, please contact The WorkPlace Group.
by Steven Lindner | May 18, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Talent Acquisition |
One of the first questions recruiters often ask candidates is how they heard about the position. In recruiting, we call this the source of hire. This is the source from which the candidate came to apply for the position. More specifically, the source of hire is simply the source that led directly to a job application. But what lead the candidate to that source and what was it about the source that motivated the candidate to apply?
Job candidates are discovered through a variety of activities and sources: job ads and postings, social media postings, tweets, job fairs, e-mails, resume databases, networking, outreach, direct calls, referrals, LinkedIn, job boards, etc. You get the idea. Job seekers and potential job candidates are all around us and there are a multitude of ways to identify and attract talent to your organization.
When HR professionals refer to the metric source of hire they are most interested in the specific source that led to the candidates job application. The thinking is that if we know the specific source, then we can focus all of our recruitment efforts on those sources and eliminate spending money on all the other sources and recruitment activities.
As it turns out, the source candidates often list as the source of hire is not always the only source that led them to apply or the source that most motivated them to apply. Here at The WorkPlace Group we are able to track the recruitment channel that drove the candidate to us. For example, we can see that a candidate clicked on our indeed.com job posting and then applied to our recruiter position. However, their job application might list referral as the source of hire. In this very common example, which source would you count as the source of hire? Was it indeed.com or referral? Objectively we know it was indeed.com. However, the most influential source that motivated the candidate to apply was likely the referral.
How Does a Source Come to Attract the Attention of Candidates?
Lets start with the basic concept of priming. Psychologists describe priming as a memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. Two important aspects of priming are perceptual (first noticing the stimulus) and conceptual (attaching meaning to the stimulus). Priming is one way we come to associate words and symbols like the name of your company with its logo. For example, when you see the Golden Arches you know its McDonalds or if you hear the slogan Just Do it you think of Nike.
Priming is like effortless thinking – through repeat exposure to the pairing of words, symbols, and slogans, we come to automatically recognize, attach meaning and respond to them. For example, have you ever had the experience of feeling like you noticed something unique for the first time (like a car you are thinking of buying) and then all of sudden you notice it (the car) everywhere? The thing you never noticed before now seems quite common. You came to recognize it automatically, almost as automatic as breathing. It is so familiar that you no longer have to dig into your memory bank to recall it.
When we advertise job opportunities on multiple sites, across social media, through direct emails, networking and calls to candidates you get the idea we are priming candidates to respond (Van Hoye & Lievens, 2007). To prime the right, qualified candidates we need to repeatedly expose candidates to our job opportunities as well as manage the message so the right candidates respond and apply.
Create Positive Memories for Candidates
Candidates are more likely to apply to subsequent job opportunities and refer others to do the same when they are repeatedly exposed to positive messages about your company from multiple sources (Turban, 2001). Recruiters not only have the chance to expose candidates to the job or company, but they also have the opportunity to create positive memories for the candidates through positive recruiting efforts. In other words, the ball is in the court of the employer and recruiter when it comes to creating a positive recruitment experience and employer brand messaging for the candidate (see How Important is the Candidate Experience During the Hiring Process for more on this topic).
Consider the Value of All Sources of Hire
Rather than a source of hire, consider sources of hire. Identify sources that facilitate links to your career site or job application versus sources that influence or motivate candidates to apply in the first place. One without the other is like the chicken and the egg adage of what came first: some say the chicken, others say the egg. In either case, both are relevant, and without either, you wouldnt have a chicken – or in the case of recruitment, an applicant.
Recruitment analytics can help determine which sources are working for or against your investment. The WorkPlace Group has extensive experience working with recruitment analytics and helping clients determine where recruiting budgets should be focused in order to maximize each dollar spent. For more information about how to incorporate strategic recruiting analytics, please contact a WorkPlace Group associate today at https://www.workplacegroup.com/contact/.
Works Cited
Van Hoye, Greet, & Lievens, Filip. (2007). Social Influence of Organizational Attractiveness: Investigating If and When Word of Mouth Matters. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 37(9), 2024-2047. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.00249.x/abstract)
Turban, D. (2001). Organizational Attractiveness as an Employer on College Campuses: An Examination of the Applicant Population. Journal of Vocational Behavior. 58, 293-312.
by Steven Lindner | Aug 4, 2014 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Recruitment Process Outsourcing, Talent Acquisition |
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the June employment report marks the fourth consecutive month of job growth. With the unemployment rate falling to 6.3% (as of March 20, 2015 the unemployment rate is 5.5%), less people are scrambling for a job.In fact, 1.4 million new jobs have been created between January and June of 2014. This is the largest gain seen since 2006 (The Economist, July 19 – 25, 2014, p. 22).
With fewer job seekers on the market, recruiting qualified candidates becomes more difficult. Employers must now begin to consider including relocation, wage increases, and employee engagement tactics into their recruitment strategy.
Relocation:
Employers must now consider offering relocation assistance to qualified job applicants, particularly to applicants with specialized skill sets. Relocation assistance now needs to be part of an employer’s recruitment strategy even for hourly and non-senior roles.
Economic growth triggers recruitment challenges for employers. Various industries including education and health services, finance, leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, and manufacturing have recorded employment gains in June. Companies that need to hire individuals with specialized skill sets or particular expertise such as bilingual fluency or computer programming are most affected.
With unemployment rates as low as 3% in some parts of the U.S., the pool of available talent is much smaller than it was several years ago. Employers now need to look outside of their local job market to fill their job openings.
Relocation has most often been limited to those in the most senior level roles. However, the largest employment growth has been seen in hourly and junior level roles. This places new pressures on employers who need individuals with specialized skill sets that may be scarce or in high demand in their local markets. For example, employers who need bilingual customer service representatives or I.T. technical support representatives, or need individuals with any type of specialized skill set will need to offer some type of relocation assistance. Otherwise, they risk not filling their open positions.
Implement Incentives:
Candidates who are not actively seeking jobs, also known as passive candidates, are even harder for employers to attract. Passive candidates are gainfully employed and, as such, require significant incentives to resign their current position. Higher wages are an obvious motivator. However, given the fact that the majority of new jobs created have been for low wage earners, these individuals are particularly attracted to opportunities offering better work-life balances and career advancement opportunities.
Do Something Different to? Motivate Candidates To Apply:
While incentives attract the candidate,they only work if candidates are aware of them. Placing job ads and waiting for candidates to apply is no longer sufficient. With so many job ads and social media campaigns being conducted, employers need to get creative in how they capture job candidates’ attention.
During the holidays, we created a “Use Your Resume to Fight Hunger Campaign.” For every qualified application received, we donated much needed food to the Salvation Army. This campaign brought thousands of unique applicants to our client. Candidates went the extra step to complete the application process because they felt they were using their time and resume for a good cause while pursuing a career-growth opportunity.
With the growing numbers of new jobs being created and a rapidly decreasing unemployment rate, employers need to consider the above factors in their recruitment plans. By rethinking their approach, employers can get the attention of top talent in an economy with dwindling supply. As a Recruitment Process Outsourcing provider, we not only find, attract and assess talent but provide counsel to companies on ways to make job opportunities appealing to the talent they need.
by Steven Lindner | Mar 27, 2014 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Recruitment Process Outsourcing |
In the dynamic landscape of modern digital communication, short-form video content has emerged as an essential tool—not just for creators and influencers, but for businesses, educators, and enterprise teams. Platforms like TikTok are revolutionizing how organizations communicate, educate, and market their ideas. However, as the reliance on video grows, so does the demand for smarter, more efficient content management solutions.
Enter the new generation of download utilities—sophisticated tools such as the TikTok downloader and TikTok watermark remover—designed to optimize how video content is retrieved, repurposed, and reused in professional environments.
The Business Case for Short-Form Video
Short-form video is no longer the domain of personal entertainment alone. In corporate settings, TikTok-style content is being adopted for:
- Employee onboarding and training modules
- Real-time marketing campaigns
- Executive communications and town halls
- Product demos and client engagement assets
Organizations leveraging TikTok video downloader tools are finding greater flexibility in content delivery, enhanced engagement, and cost-effective ways to repurpose high-performing media across channels.
Why Downloading TikTok Videos Adds Strategic Value
The ability to download TikTok videos securely and efficiently is more than a convenience—it’s a competitive advantage. A trusted TikTok video downloader enables:
- Permanent access to time-sensitive or trending content
- Seamless integration into corporate LMS or CRM platforms
- Rapid development of branded educational resources
Equally valuable is the capability to remove embedded logos and user IDs through a TikTok watermark remover, which enhances professionalism and aligns content with corporate standards.
A standout tool in this domain is , offering secure, high-speed downloads and native watermark-free functionality.
Enterprise-Level Use Cases
- Internal Communications: Human Resources can utilize short-form clips for compliance training or wellness campaigns.
- Marketing Strategy: Content teams can repurpose viral TikToks for cross-platform storytelling on Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.
- Executive Outreach: Leaders can adapt industry-specific videos into engaging internal announcements or investor presentations.
All of these workflows benefit from streamlined access through a dedicated TikTok downloader.
Data Privacy, Ethics, and Responsible Usage
When integrating downloaded content, organizations must balance efficiency with compliance. Best practices include:
- Ensuring content is used under Fair Use or with permission
- Avoiding any modifications that may misrepresent original creators
- Utilizing platforms like TikTok watermark remover solely for editorial or educational repurposing
Trusted tools like ssvtiktok.com do not store user data or downloaded files, supporting enterprise-level security protocols.
Conclusion: A Smarter Path Forward
In 2025, digital agility is a critical business imperative. Forward-thinking companies are already investing in tools that enhance their media strategy—TikTok video downloader platforms among them. These solutions empower teams to operate faster, maintain brand consistency, and unlock greater value from short-form video content.
By leveraging utilities like TikTok downloader and TikTok watermark remover, organizations can transform the way they educate, communicate, and inspire—building a future-ready digital culture.
