The Future of Tech Talent and Recruitment Is NOW
On Wednesday 31 March, Contino’s VP of Talent Neil Shmuely and Head of Talent Branding Casey Walker sat down for an online panel discussion: The Future of Tech Talent & Recruitment Is NOW.
During the webinar, they discussed the trends and themes shaping tech recruitment, how our culture has impacted the way we recruit, and why it’s important to further invest in your recruiting programs and employees. Those who watched the webinar learned how organizations have still managed to see positive recruitment outcomes despite shifting to remote work.
Our talent experts here at Contino have laid out 5 top areas of focus for attracting transformational employees of the present and future.
1. Employee Value Proposition (EVP) Workshops
How do you define an employer brand and create one that attracts, engages and retains top tier talent?
At Contino, we have implemented bi-annual EVP workshops where we take time to interview employees 1:1, which helps us evaluate our culture and figure out who our employees are. It’s critical to learn more about your employees, what traits and commonalities they have, and what makes a successful employee at your organization in order to recruit the right candidates. This also tells an organization what they might be missing, and where they need to focus with respect to ‘culture add’.
“For us EVPs are at the forefront of everything we do at the business, as they are our main vehicle to introduce positive change. The way we see it, we do health check ups as human beings so why not do them as organizations?”
— Casey Walker
2. Define Your Roles
You’ve done your EVPs, collected crucial feedback, are able to understand your employees and identify who they are. Now it's time to define the core roles at your organization, determine who you are seeking and establish what they are going to do. It’s key therefore, to get your talent team aligned with hiring managers as early as possible, in order to create a consistent message and understand what you’re going to market for.
“In order to successfully scale an organization in 2021, it’s really important that you define these core roles and have your recruitment team constantly on the look out for this talent, for when demand does spike from a hiring perspective, recruiters are able to mine from a bigger talent pool that you fostered over a longer period of time.”
— Neil Shmuely
3. Attract Top Tier Candidates Through a Talent Pipeline
How do you go about building a community and a talent pipeline to grow your organization? Developing a talent pipeline has expedited the ability of talent teams on to modernize their processes, expand their talent pools, and enhance their digital employer brands. Focus building a pipeline that displays a transparent and honest story about what it’s like to work at your organization through specific, targeted campaigns:
- Paid Campaigns (Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.) — choose a target audience you want to focus on based on skill set, industry, or where you want your campaign to display
- Promote your culture — create videos, blog posts, or other pieces of thought leadership
- Utilize Social Media — research your candidates online presence and generate campaigns around where they are active
- Brand awareness campaigns — if they are not applying directly to your organization, they can still be aware of it
- Use your EVP feedback to build a customized brand awareness and recruitment campaign like Contino’s #MoreThanAJob
- Proactive Search — bring in an in-house talent team or partner with recruiters to build up your pipeline internally
4. The Culture First Candidate Mindset
Over half of the people who responded to the recent Glassdoor Mission and Culture Survey said that company culture is even more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction.
You can no longer just please candidates through compensation alone. Remember that the candidate reigns supreme: you need to showcase your culture, present opportunities for them to succeed, and demonstrate how they can learn and develop at your organization.
This ties directly back to your EVPs, as you learn exactly what your culture and values are from your existing employee feedback, and are able to discover areas which need to improve.
“We can’t speak highly enough about embedding your culture, mission, and values into your recruitment strategy and collateral. If you’re not doing it well and explaining the impact your company has, you’re simply not going to get outcomes and the right candidates.”
— Neil Shmuely
5. Diversity, Equity, Belonging & Inclusion: D.E.B.I. Is No Longer an Afterthought
At Contino, we’ve put Diversity, Equity, Belonging & Inclusion at the forefront of our recruitment strategy and efforts:
- We’ve utilized cutting edge technology to update the verbiage of our job advertisements to account for more diverse candidates
- All employees, including those on interview panels, complete training to better combat any internal bias that they might have been unaware of, such as our workshop ‘Unlocking Your Unconscious Bias’
- We also take in feedback from both new hires on their candidate journey and existing employees during EVPs to see where we need to improve our D.E.B.I. initiatives and actions
We find that collaboration is the key to our success at Contino, and we want our business made up of people from all backgrounds who are made to feel comfortable bringing their own unique perspectives and experience.
