Hey Rally community! My name is SteFan and I’m the Head of Talent Acquisition Operations at Postmates.
SteFan PremDas is the Head of Talent Acquisition Operations at Postmates.
I’m a problem-solver at heart and throughout my career journey I’ve been fortunate to solve some unique business challenges. More specifically, coming from a background in science, I love to leverage data and tools to optimize talent acquisition and the candidate experience. And in my view, data and technology are playing a bigger and bigger role in shaping the candidate experience and how employers recruit effectively, especially when it comes to increasing diversity.
In this blog post, I’d like to share some of the key lessons I’ve learned about candidate experience this year, and share how I’ve used data to help Postmates not only increase our talent pipeline and meet our hiring goals during the pandemic, but lay the foundation for increasing our diversity as well. It’s a story of strategy, technology and data that I hope will help you as well.
Building a TA tech stack to support your business goals
One thing I’m quite proud of is the all-star tech stack we’ve built at Postmates to enable our talent acquisition and HR teams to do their best work. With the right tech stack, you can automate a lot of tasks so that your recruiters can focus on more strategic value-add activities, like building relationships with candidates.
At the very top of the funnel, we leverage Recruitics to manage our programmatic job advertising strategy. This platform optimizes the delivery of our job ads and makes sure we’re spending our dollars in the right places to reach our talent audience.
From there, we use EightfoldAI to enhance our candidate experience. Eightfold AI is a talent intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assess candidates based on their potential and match them to jobs, build instant talent pipelines for every position and eliminate bias from the hiring process. Eightfold also serves as the host for our careers site and candidate relationship management (CRM) platform.
Eightfold is particularly important to our TA strategy as we wanted to make our candidate experience as inclusive as possible for our candidates. Since Eightfold helps us to understand a candidate’s potential, rather than just matching based on wha’s on their resume today, it’s an extremely useful tool that helps us hire in a way that’s in line with our diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) values. That’s really the future of talent acquisition — thinking less about what someone’s done and more about what they can do in the future.
Moving further along the candidate journey to the interview stage, we use a tool called GoodTime to automate the interview scheduling process. This frees up our team’s time and also improves the candidate experience. Previously, our recruiting coordinators spent 110% of their time (quite a bit of overtime) scheduling interviews — not the best use of time considering we hire really smart and creative people! Since implementing GoodTime, our coordinators have been able to help out with other strategic projects, like analytics and Recruitment Marketing initiatives.
Our recruitment process also includes pre-employment assessments. We use CodeSignals to issue coding assessments for our engineering candidates and Pymetrics, a talent matching platform that uses psychometric assessments to evaluate a candidate’s ability to thrive within the role.
As you can see, we use a lot of different systems to create the best experience for our candidates and team members, this helps our organization focus on Talent Acquisition experience versus managing administrative tasks.
Going through an RFP process can be daunting, so I wanted to share 2 key things I look for when evaluating a system:
- Does the tool give you the right data and insights? Think about the topics that are/will be important to your business and make sure your systems can give you the data needed to gain insights on those respective topics.
- Is the system easy to use? Not just from a candidate experience perspective, but will it also make your TA team’s life easier? A technology only works as well as its users!
Rally note: SteFan mentions several time-saving recruitment automation tools. If you’re looking to learn more, check out our blog: 9 Recruitment Automation Tools When Applications Surge.
Using technology to create a positive candidate experience
In addition to the above tech stack, there are a few specific recruiting technologies that I wanted to touch on that enable us to serve our candidates better in their job search process. Here are a few details about each of them:
Job matching & Job insights
As I mentioned earlier, there can be a lot of barriers in the job application process, That can cause you to miss out on qualified candidates! That’s why the two features we love to provide to candidates that arrive on our career site are job matching and job insights. When a candidate submits their resume, they are given a prioritized list of a graphic will appear that shows the profile of others who have been in similar positions before.
I love this because it focuses less on what your resume says and more on how your skills and profile match up with others in this role that we’ve hired before. The other thing it does is that it encourages people to apply who might not think that they’re qualified for a role, and this will improve the diversity of your slate of candidates.
Using the Job Insights Feature, candidates can see how good of a fit their resume and skills are to others in the role who were hired previously.
The other great thing about this functionality is that even if a prospective candidate doesn’t end up hitting submit on an application, we now have their profile in our database, which has created an amazing talent pool that our recruiters can now leverage.
Chatbots
Candidates love to receive information in real-time. That’s why chatbots are a great way to engage prospective talent! We have a chatbot named Serve who helps candidates find the information they’re looking for such as more details about the job, or company culture insights such as what Postmates is like from a diversity or a benefits perspective. Serve is still a work-in-progress, but eventually, it will also be able to recommend content such as blogs and videos based on a candidate’s interest.
Chatbots are a great way to engage with prospective talent in real time.
Job cart
As I previously mentioned, candidates today have less time to dedicate to the job application process. We introduced a “job cart” feature to help candidates apply to multiple jobs at once. Similar to an online store, candidates can select jobs and click “add to cart” to instantly apply to as many jobs as they would like! I think about that functionality from the perspective of a working parent, where maybe they can’t find the 15 to 20 minutes to dedicate to filling out multiple applications.
Looking at data to understand if your tech is working
To learn if our various tech tools are working and where we might need to consider additional solutions in the future, I also put a big emphasis on data in guiding our TA approach. My philosophy when it comes to data is to focus less so on what we “should” be measuring and more on what problem we’re trying to solve. I always make an effort to understand the pain points of the business, the c-suite and our leadership — and then focus our metrics around that.
Here are some of the areas where we focus our efforts to track this:
Applicant volume
Funny enough, even with all the data points, I actually often refer back to some of the “basics” that can often get overlooked, like applicant volume. Why is this useful? From my perspective, as you start to see spikes in applications, you can cross reference that with new candidate experience functionality or Recruitment Marketing content that you’ve been pushing out.
Candidate source and demographics
I also like to look at candidate sourcing data to understand where our talent is coming from. This helps me understand which channels and tools are working most effectively for us. In addition, demographic information has been particularly important to measure our DEI efforts.
Funnel conversion rates
Efficiency is important to creating a positive candidate experience, so I like to understand how much time our candidates are spending in each stage of the candidate journey to understand our funnel makeup and where candidates might be falling through the cracks. We can then hone in on areas where we’re seeing a lot of drop off to improve the experience and conversion metrics over time.
Quality of candidate
Quality of candidate is a metric that a lot of companies are looking at these days. We want to know that we are attracting the right candidates to our organization, but “quality” can be subjective and is defined differently at each organization.
There are a couple different ways that you can approach measuring the quality of candidates you’re receiving. For example, if you don’t have a sophisticated analytics platform, you could do something as simple as looking at how many candidates move on from the application stage and pass a hiring manager review or land an interview or whatever your next stage is.
In the end, the tech stack you choose to build and the data you use to measure the success of your efforts are going to be really customized depending on your organization’s business, challenges and hiring goals. However, I hope hearing about some of the areas where we’re focusing our recruiting strategy provides you with some ideas to improve your candidate experience and attract more diverse hires too!
If you’d like to hear more about using tech and data to improve your diversity hiring, then watch my talk at the RallyFwd Virtual Conference on Dec. 2, 2020. You can register for free here >