While millions of people have quit their jobs in just the last month, this does not spell bad news for all employers — after all, talent is not just resigning, but reshuffling.
But what employers will win the talent they need in today’s
“This is not just about social justice, although that's important,” says Chait. “It’s about being competitive because so much value comes from human capital in business today.”
Read more:
To be competitive, it will take having talent from varying backgrounds and experiences. Harvard Business Review found that diverse companies were 70% more likely to capture new markets, while McKinsey reported that ethnically and racially diverse companies were 35% more likely to perform better financially. According to tech company Cloverpop, diverse teams outperform non-diverse teams 87% of the time.
But hiring from a diverse candidate pool is easier said than done. Employee Benefit News spoke with Chait to gain further insight into how employers can expand their hiring horizons and be prepared for the ongoing war for talent.
What’s Greenhouse’s mission as a recruitment and hiring tech company?
By helping companies become great at hiring, we can help them not only compete for talent and find the best people for their roles, but we can help them become more objective and more open-minded in how they hire. That would potentially provide advancement and access to opportunities otherwise not provided to millions of people in the workplace.
Read more:
The way we do this is by providing a set of software tools that help companies plan, manage and execute all aspects of their hiring process. There’s definitely a lot of administrative parts to it, but the bigger message here is that if companies have an advantage in their hiring process, that gives them a fundamental competitive capability that most companies today don't have.
What gives companies that advantage?
The truth of the matter is that if you're unknowingly filtering out talented people from your role and your competitors aren't, they're going to win. Often companies over-constrain their search. In other words, they artificially limit who they will look for or whose applications they will consider based on a set of criteria that may not even apply to the job.
For example, many jobs are posted with college degree requirements — it’s done thoughtlessly. People put up jobs and say they need a four-year degree or even a master's degree, but it turns out there are a lot of jobs that don’t need a college degree. People just add it as a qualification because it sounds good or because they think you get a level of quality when someone comes from a top school. But as we all know, the systems for getting people into those schools and graduating are themselves quite biased. So just by putting that requirement on a job, you are artificially limiting yourself in ways that will prevent you from diversifying your team.
What else commonly happens in the hiring process that can lead to bias?
Companies rely on gut instinct during interviews. They don't have interview training or preparation. There’s just not a lot of structure in place. As a result, they throw a candidate on Zoom, but what a good candidate needs is undefined. So that candidate gets on Zoom with your employee and your employee starts asking a bunch of questions — but that employee may not know if those questions were already asked, if those questions are relevant to the job, if those questions are illegal or if those questions are biased.
Read more:
Interviewing is not a skill you're born with; you have to be trained on it. You also need to build an interview structure for each job. In other words, you line up the criteria you’re testing for, and each of those points are on a scorecard. You then have an interview dedicated to finding your set of criteria in a candidate. And now you can compare candidates like apples to apples because every candidate goes through the same set of interviews, and they're scored on the same scorecard. I think this gives your team the ability to make more objective decisions.
How has the pandemic affected the hiring landscape in regards to diversity?
Something that is very timely these days is how employers view geographical requirements. It used to be that we could only hire within a 30-minute drive from our office, but now companies can reconsider where they hire their employees.
Read more:
For example, at Greenhouse, we've done a huge amount of hiring in the past year and a half from all over the country because we didn't have to worry anymore about whether people were in Denver, San Francisco or New York. As a result, we have been able to open up our job opportunities to way more people, including a much more diverse group of people.
What are your biggest takeaways from 2021 when it comes to successfully hiring talent?
Your competitors are realizing that they do not need to care about whether people have a four-year degree or went to a college that their mom has never heard of — what they care about is whether a candidate is going to be good at their job and add value to the company’s customers and culture.
The talent market is on the side of the employees and candidates as opposed to the side of the companies, which has been the trend for decades. These days changing jobs is just as easy as closing one app and opening another. You don't even have to change your commute. Talent has a huge amount of leverage and companies have to be much more proactive in finding people to fill their roles. You need to research talent, connect with them and make sure they know that you want them and what you stand for. Because if you don't do that, I guarantee your competitors will.
