101+ Recruiting Hacks to Accelerate Your Hiring in 2018

I’ve said it many times: the best recruiters aren’t necessarily smarter or better than their peers, they just know how to get 12 hours of work out of an 8-hour day. In our business, it’s all about efficiency. We have to streamline our efforts, avoid redundant efforts, automate manual tasks and multitask all day every day… all while creating a seamless hiring manager and candi-date experience. No pressure, right?

If you’ve ever waited tables and “been in the weeds” with six large tables all seated at once, then you have an idea what a day in the life of a recruit-er is like. Just as a waitress can’t afford to take 15 separate trips back to the kitchen for each meal, the ketchup, the coffee pot and extra napkins, recruiters can’t afford to be inefficient and disorganized in their daily pro-cesses. We need to figure out how to do it all “in one trip”, if you will. Multi-task. Work smarter, not harder. Focus. Avoid distractions. Scratch things off the list and move on to the next. This is the REAL key to recruiting success.

Foreword

Thankfully, there are so many tools, technologies, tips and tricks out there that, with a little practice and experimentation, you can quickly find ways to get 5 minutes, an hour, even a full day back on your calendar if you play your cards right. This ebook is a fabulous compilation of some tried and true recruiting hacks to get you started on that path. Give ‘em a shot and just watch how much more you get done. Happy recruiting, everybody!

Founder, Tenfold & The Talent Agency

Stacy Zapar

The above definition perfectly encapsulates what we’ll be sharing in this ebook - minus the computer hardware part. By “hack” we mean a creative shortcut, an innovative tactic that allows you to tackle a problem in a novel way. Hacks allow you to generate impact without maxing out your recruit-ing budget or overhauling your entire interview process. Oh, and there’s a certain secret sauce associated with hacks. Not everyone is using them, because not everyone knows they exist.

In this ebook, we share tips that embody one or all of those qualities: creative, a shortcut, innovative, underutilized. Armed with these 103 recruiting hacks, we hope teams can hit their most ambitious hiring goals faster in 2018.

Need to step up your employer branding game? Refine your interviewing techniques? Leverage data to plan your 2018 headcount? You’re in the right place. In addition to Stacy Zapar, we sought the advice of talent leaders at Medallia, Netflix, Thread, Whisper and LevelUp to gather best-in-class hacks across eight key elements of the hiring process. We’re releasing them rapid-fire, roughly in the order they fall in the recruiting lifecycle. Read all the way through, or jump to the chapter that aligns with your most press-ing recruitment goals.

Hack [hak]: a strategy or technique adopted in order to manage one’s time and activities in a more efficient way, derived from solving a computer hardware or program limitation.

Contents

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Employer branding

Sourcing and referrals

Hiring manager-recruiter collaboration

Candidate experience

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5

6

7

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Interviewing

Closing candidates

Data-driven recruiting

Diversity recruiting

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1) Hire a photographer to capture team photos

We know, we’re all photographers these days. Still, we promise that hiring a professional to take headshots and team photos for one day will pay off. You’ll be able to proudly use these photos in all your em-ployer branding efforts - whether on your website, in blog posts, or even conference presentations. And you’ll help your employees put their best foot forward on LinkedIn and other social platforms where future hires are checking them out.

2) Customize your careers page with employee spotlights

Candidates want to hear from current employees. Why did those team members join? What does their role entail, and why is it fulfilling? Use the pictures from the professional photoshoot above to portray employees in their work environment. With Lever, seam-lessly build a custom page that reflects your brand and encourages candidates to apply.

3) Create a company hashtag for employees to use in social posts

If you don’t have an employee nickname (like Eventbrite’s Britelings or Quora’s Quorans), poll your team to create one. Start plastering it everywhere in your office - with hashtag included - to ingrain it in

Employer branding

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employees’ minds. Whenever you see employees post on social me-dia with other employees, reach out to ask them to use the hashtag. At Lever, our employees are Leveroos and we use the hashtag #in-sideLever.

4) Post on your employee blog biweekly

Start by creating a blog series that periodically spotlights a different employee. Use a simple Q&A format - with questions like “What’s your favorite [company] memory?” and “How would you characterize your team?” - and feature a high definition photo of the employee in the post. Don’t forget - candidates want the inside scoop.

5) Spend 30 minutes each week responding to company reviews on Glassdoor

You can sign up for a free employer account on Glassdoor. Once you do, block off time on your calendar each week to respond to both the positive and negative reviews. Express gratitude for glowing write-ups, and reply with concern to those that are less than stellar. The bottom line: 30 minutes will go a long way toward conveying your brand’s humility and humanness.

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6) Analyze company reviews to learn which cultural pillars to highlight

If you haven’t yet fully defined your employee value proposition, Glassdoor reviews can be a great source of insight. Analyze your reviews to find 5-10 common qualities that your reviewers find spe-cial about your team, and have your employees select which ones resonate most. Then, make those the values you spotlight.

7) Roll out a “LinkedIn Profile Revamp” campaign

Host a company-wide meeting at which you ask employees to add three elements to their LinkedIn profile: 1. The impact of their role, 2. What they think is special about your team, and 3. Their favorite activities outside of work - whether that’s concerts or chess. Recruit marketing team members to walk around and help employees craft stories.

8) Create an ‘impact description’, not a ‘job description’

Top candidates don’t just want a job that pays the bills - they crave impact. When you post opportunities, describe what candidates will accomplish in their first month, three months, six months on your team. This will save time later in the interview process - candidates will have a more concrete, inspiring sense of what’s expected of them, and hiring managers will have thought ahead to how they can successfully onboard new hires.

9) A/B test your job postings

LevelUp, a mobile payments company in Cambridge, drove a 15 percent increase in the number of inbound applicants by A/B testing job posting titles and descriptions. With unlimited job postings in Lever, you can write two versions of your impact description, see which delivers the most quality candidates, and stick with the most effective.

10) Identify and remove bias from your job postings

Detect and eliminate phrases that might deter women or underrepre-sented minorities from reading further - terms such as “coding ninja” or “closer”, to widen your pool of interested candidates. Textio, for example, is a tool that teams use to write more inclusive, attractive job descriptions.

11) Run your jobs postings through “user testing” with employees

If you don’t want to invest in a tool, leverage the insights of your coworkers. Arrange a meeting with a diverse set of employees, read your job postings out loud, and ask them to react aloud to words they do and don’t like.

To make those job postings way more effective...

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12) Ask candidates “How did you hear about us?”

Candidates don’t hear about a role or company from just one source. Using Lever, we added a custom application question to all job post-ings: “How did you hear about us?”, with multi-select checkboxes for our common buckets (referrals, job sites, publications, etc). This supplements the candidate’s origin and source data to shed light on what attracts them.

13) Schedule quarterly Employee Value Proposition “health checks”

Your talent brand breathes, grows and evolves over time, whether you like it or not. Plan for change by scheduling regular EVP “health checks” with a few key individuals each quarter. Identifying the characteristics of your org helps you be proactive about making changes to your org, rather than reacting to them.

14) Treat your brand like you treat your favorite family pet

Take your brand out for a walk - go to events, have your engineers on the floor. Or, even better, ask them to give a talk! Introduce people in your community to your brand - host meetups and networking events, and engage with people on social media. Feed your brand - crowd-source information to fuel your brand with hashtag contests, calls for information, and employee spotlights.

15) Co-locate your teams and managers

To build a great employer brand, think globally and be inclusive. We push for global mindsets and information sharing at Medallia by having co-located teams and managers - for example, our Employer Branding Program Manager sits in our Argentina office and reports to our Talent Operations leader in California. We also emphasize being mindful of other languages and cultures. We partner with our Inclusion Practice Lead and local Medallians to ensure our commu-nications initiatives send the intended message.

16) Leverage your internal experts for Talent BrandingYou probably have subject matter experts inside your company that run programs you can use in Talent Branding, even if you don’t know it. For example, if you’re planning an advertising campaign, talk to your Marketing or Demand Generation teams. They bring best practices and can provide company-specific insights you won’t find elsewhere. A great talent brand aligns to your product brand, and this can be only be achieved through collaboration.

Global Employer Brand Manager, Medallia

Ariel Jolo

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A few sourcing hacks from our foreword author herself, Stacy Zapar

17) Use calendar “chunking” for sourcing, phone screens, etc.

Block chunks of time on your calendar for sourcing, phone screens, candidate feedback, hiring manager meetings, etc. If you don’t block the time, it might get booked with other lower priority items (and sourcing should be a daily priority!). Personally, I focus on sourcing first thing in the morning and do my calls and meetings later in the day, but find a system that works best for you. And while you’re at it, include a lunch break for much-needed recharging time. We all need that too!

Sourcing and referrals

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Founder, Tenfold & The Talent AgencyStacy ZaparHacks from

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18) Make OneTab your best friend

If you’re a “tab junkie” like I am, who opens up multiple candidate profile links while you source, this life hack is for you. Use a browser extension called OneTab. It will zap all of your open tabs into a sin-gle one so you can re-open each tab as you’re ready to review it.

19) Give tree ring sourcing a try

When you’re sourcing candidates, start narrow and work your way out. Use a Boolean AND operator for both required and desired skills, and use a small zip code search radius, then slowly expand your search from there (if necessary). It’s better to nurture the right candidate from the start than it is to bulk message 500 “maybe” can-didates, just hoping that something sticks. If you’re not finding the right candidates, slowly expand your search geographically or move some of the “requireds” to “desireds”.

20) Find any candidate’s email address

Did you just come across your dream candidate, but you aren’t sure how to contact them? Work emails tend to follow a pattern, like firstname@company.com, or FirstInitialLastName@company.com. To find the pattern, create this string using the company’s URL:

“contact OR email * * companyname.com”

To get you started, here’s the spreadsheet I use to track company email patterns.

You can find more stellar hacks from Stacy here.

21) Host team-wide sourcing jams

Make sourcing fun and find new candidates faster by hosting a company-wide sourcing session - complete with music, pizza, and even beer. Be sure to kick off the “jam” by equipping everyone with sourcing best practices and templates, then display them on a large screen so that your team can use them real-time.

22) Tap into the “People also viewed” section of qualified people on LinkedIn

Look on the right side of most LinkedIn profiles, and you’ll see other profiles that are often searched along with that one. Think of the most talented people on your current or former team, and dive into that section of their page.

23) Pull all candidate profiles from online hubs into your ATS

Forget the hassle of keeping track of candidates on GitHub, An-gellist, and LinkedIn. Bring their information into one centralized location - reach out to all your candidates in your ATS.

24) Set up a Google alert for your top prospect’s name

If there’s a candidate you’re courting, use Google Alerts to get noti-fied when there’s an article published about them online. That way, you can send a related follow-up to show them that you’re paying attention. We bet they’ll be impressed.

25) Throw quarterly referral-a-thons

Wasting time asking your team to submit referrals at every company meeting? Plan a referral-a-thon once a quarter - an hour-long referral party at which employees race to submit as many referrals as they can. Schedule it in the morning when employees first get in and have energy, and provide breakfast and fun tunes while you’re at it.

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26) Send automated follow-ups to check in with candidates

Second and third follow-ups can double your candidate response rate, but it’s not easy to remember to send them. Save yourself time by automating your follow-ups in Lever Nurture.

27) Capitalize on engagement notifications

One feature in Lever Nurture allows you to see when candidates open and click your emails. Even if they don’t respond, this is key info that can drive you to reach out again. Oh, and guess what? When candidates do respond, we automatically progress them to the next pipeline stage, so you can stay organized and quickly see who’s ready to engage.

28) Use Lever Nurture Recommendations to resurface archived candidates

Why spend hours searching for new talent when you already have in-credible talent sitting in your ATS? Lever Nurture Recommendations will suggest qualified candidates you’ve already pulled into your recruiting software - who you perhaps didn’t hire because the timing was wrong - who could be the right fit for your open role.

Special sourcing hacks for Lever Nurture users

29) Send for your hiring manager to increase candidate response rates

Having trouble getting candidates to respond? Try sending for their future manager or an executive. They’ll be much more likely get back to a sender who they recognize or know they’d be working alongside.

30) Identify, clone and improve your best performing reach-out templates

To help you really think like a marketer, Lever Nurture Reports help you look across every reachout from your team and see which ones get the most opens, clicks and responses. Find what’s working, socialize that with the rest of the team, and your overall sourcing effectiveness will rise. If you notice one sourcer or recruiter has a particularly popular reach-out, call them out! Ask them to share which technique they think is driving their success at your next team meeting.

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31) Reward employees who submit referrals with restaurant gift cards

Bottom line: referrals are one of the most rewarding recruiting tactics around. In fact, our research shows that one in 16 referrals are hired, compared to one in 152 candidates who apply through your website or job boards. But it helps to incentivize your employees to submit them. If you don’t have a referral bonus ins place, publicly acknowl-edge and reward the employee who’s submitted the most quality referrals with a gift card to the restaurant of their choice.

32) Share a new “Sourcing Tip of the Week/ Month” in team meetings

Learning tips from your peers is way easier than scouring the web for them. Start a tradition of team members sharing new tips regu-larly - that way, you’re always keeping your tactics fresh, varied, and effective.

33) Integrate “open role spotlights” into your company’s weekly all-hands

To drive “referrals that count”, make key roles you’re trying to fill top of mind for the whole team. When you give the recruiting updates during your next company-wide meeting (you do do that, right?), focus on the highest-priority positions. Be sure to highlight the qual-ities, skills, and experience you’re looking for so that team members recommend the most fitting candidates.

34) Pore through your coworker’s connections

Connect with an existing team member on LinkedIn, source their connections, send that employee the names of the people you found in their network, then ask for a simple “Would you refer this person? yes/no?”. It’s an easy way to get referrals you may not have gotten otherwise.

35) Find where candidates hang out (online)

No need to make it to every candidate meetup when you have the internet. Are you looking for Social Media people? Try Instagram. Engineers? Try Github. Or maybe Reddit. Or Twitter. Designers? Try Dribbble. Or Tumblr. Or Pinterest. Different communities of people have different online forums they flock to. Not everyone’s on Linke-dIn.

36) Build rapport with candidates who aren’t right

Great people know great people - if I’ve built a great rapport with a candidate who ends up not being right for the job, they almost al-ways have zero problem sending me the names of other great people who may be closer to what I’m looking for. So always ask for referrals if you feel comfortable - this tactic has resulted in a few different success stories of mine.

37) Use the “Find more people like...” feature

LinkedIn Recruiter’s search bar allows you to type in an exact name and pull profiles similar to that individual. I like to use this with the existing team, dream hires, or even people we’ve passed on whose backgrounds were great otherwise.

Recruiting Researcher, Netflix

Hacks from

Tennyson Jones

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Hiring manager- recruiter collaboration

38) Go through 10 resumes with your hiring manager before kicking off every candidate search

Print out a batch of candidate profiles, then push your hiring manag-er to tell you what excites or deflates them about each one. This will clarify what they’re looking for, help you bring candidates in that match their ideal template, and propel your search forward.

39) Account for attrition when you headcount plan

If you haven’t already synced with your hiring manager about headcount planning for 2018, time to get on it! But when you do, don’t forget that turnover is inevitable. As you strategize together to build their team, discuss the reality that you’ll likely need to hire into backfills. It may be unpredictable, but promotion and attrition will require you to recruit more talent overall throughout the year. Look at past turnover to assess how many more candidates you may have to hire in 2018.

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40) @-mention your hiring manager within your ATS to communicate easily

Forget lengthy email threads. Use @-mentions - just like you use on Twitter on Facebook - in Lever to quickly sync with your hiring partner.

41) Block off time on your hiring manager’s calendar so they can shadow you

As someone whose job is to hire candidates, your hiring managers benefit immensely from seeing you in action. They’ll instantly learn new, effective questions, and even absorb best practices like allotting substantial time for the candidate to ask questions or selling them on company culture. And don’t forget to ask for their feedback after-wards - you can learn from them as well.

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42) Shadow your hiring manager in return

During your search, sit in a couple of your hiring manager’s inter-views to make sure they feel empowered to ask the most effective questions. By seeing whether or not they ask every candidate similar questions, for example, you can help them reduce unconscious bias. And afterwards, set up a casual meeting to share any feedback you emerge with.

43) For faster cycles with your hiring manager, use their favorite communication channels

Chances are your hiring manager doesn’t hang out all day in your ATS. Oh, and they’re probably in back-to-back meetings. In your intake meeting, ask about the best way to get hold of them, and leverage your ATS’s integrations to speed up the conversation. The Lever + Slack integration, for example, allows you to set up interview reminders, send interviewers candidate profiles, and send feedback reminders right in Slack.

44) Send hiring managers a brief feedback survey midway through your candidate search

Create a survey through SurveyMonkey or Google Forms. Ask ques-tions like “Do you currently think we’re targeting the right candi-dates?”, “Which qualifications would you like to focus on more heav-ily?”, and “What can we both do better to hire the right candidate?”. Afterwards, you can make slight but impactful adjustments to match what your hiring manager is looking for.

45) Sync your emails with your ATS

Did we mention your hiring manager is insanely busy? This will make their life easier. Empower them to communicate with other in-terviewers and candidates wherever they are - whether that’s in their email or applicant tracking system. The full history of candidate communication should live in both places!

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48) Orchestrate a coffee meetup between your candidate and hiring manager

End your hiring process by giving your finalist candidates the chance to meet more informally with their future manager. This is a great time for them to surface questions, build more rapport, and hear more detail about their potential manager’s journey at your com-pany. Often, it can be the turning point meeting that drives your candidate to say yes.

49) Support your recruiter/hiring manager conversations with data

Know the market, and be able to share exactly how many leads and emails you’ve sent. You can make smarter hiring decisions togeth-er when you know realities such as which recruiting methods are leading to the most hires, how many candidates are applying and replying to sourcing reach-outs, and your offer acceptance rate.

Head of Talent, ThreadMelissa Trahan

46) Make a list of your “reach” candidates with your hiring manager

These can be candidates who are not ready to leave their current role, or those whom you know you’ll have to woo considerably be-cause they’re at the top of their game. Regardless, return to this list to ensure you’re keeping the hiring bar at their level. Not getting a response from them? It goes a long way to send as the hiring manag-er or CEO/CTO/whoever is the most relevant stakeholder.

47) Institute quick 5 minute feedback after every meeting

In this brief feedback session, ask questions like: “How could the meeting have been better?”, and “How can we improve upon the overall process?”. That way, future meetings will go more smoothly, and you can ensure that you’re continuously creating better experi-ences for candidates.

Hacks from

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Candidate experience4

50) Streamline and shorten your application

Give your candidates a better experience by stripping your appli-cation of unnecessary details or questions. Use a modern ATS that allows you to create simple, intuitive applications that candidates can quickly complete. This is no longer a nice-to-have, by the way - a poor digital experience will lead candidates to question how forward-thinking your organization is compared to others they’re evaluating.

51) Send a pump-up email to your hiring team before the first interview of the search

Spend 10 minutes crafting a message that will align and excite your interview squad. Use bullet points to list info such as: a link to your candidate’s ATS profile, any fun or interesting facts you’ve learned through your research, why your candidate wants to switch roles, and your candidate’s potential impact on the team. This will help them give candidates a better experience.

52) Hire a candidate experience specialist

In a competitive talent market, making every candidate feel special can literally be a full-time job. Recruit a new team member who can take them on a company tour, bring them from one interview to another, and serve as their main point of contact.

53) Introduce roundtable questions to stimulate lunch conversation

If your interview schedule includes lunch, help everyone at those long lunch tables get to know your candidate, and vice versa. Buy a set of roundtable questions to spark fun topics; examples include: “How would you spend $1 million?”, and “What superpower do you wish you had and why?”.

54) Snooze candidates to prompt regular check-ins

Is the candidate you just reached out to not ready to switch roles? Make sure you’re top of mind when they are. When you “snooze” candidates for a custom number of months or weeks in Lever, you’ll receive a reminder to reach out at the future date you set, along with any notes so you can pick up where you left off.

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55) Personalize a short video for your candidate

Make a video for every candidate who receives an offer, to let them know how excited you are. First of all, this makes them feel special, and secondly, you can increase acceptance rates - and promote your brand even if the candidate turns down your offer. In the video, be sure to feature different team members, gorgeous footage of your headquarters with the landscape around it, and mention the compa-ny benefits they have to look forward to. Everyone in the video can also address the candidate by name and tailor their message to what they’ve learned about their interests. For example, our team mem-bers will joke: “Can’t wait to challenge you in that foozball match,” if they talked about it during the interview process.

former VP of People Operations, WhisperMichelle Hart

56) Place a culture book featuring company stories on your lobby table

Don’t let your candidate sit in your lobby twiddling their thumbs. Help them pass the time by featuring employee stories or interesting facts about your team while they wait for interviewers! This is a sim-ple way to get them energized about the team before their interview.

57) Host a 10 minute tour before every interview

If you can, leave a 15 minute buffer between every candidate’s arrival time and interview. Show them the lay of the land, help them envi-sion what their day-to-day would look like, and even introduce them to any team members they may not meet during their interviews.

Hacks from

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Interviewing

58) Use Easy Book to help candidates self-schedule

Make it effortless for candidates to schedule their own interviews using Easy Book, and you can spend less time coordinating them yourself and more time on strategic recruiting. Bonus: The interview-er and candidate will both receive a calendar invite once the time is booked.

59) Give every new interviewer a cheat sheet

There’s a lot of information you’ll want to share with interviewers about how to effectively interview for your open role. Create a quick cheat sheet with details like sample questions, qualities to prioritize, and tips for how to authentically share their own story and that of the company.

60) Organize a quarterly interviewer check-in

Let’s say you’re looking to build your sales team. Chances are you’ll hire several sales development reps, all of whom will meet with the same interviewers. To help those interviewers do their best work, or-ganize a quarterly interviewer check-in. Ask your hiring manager to lead the check-ins with you, as you share process updates and revisit interview best practices.

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61) Bring in your sales leader to teach the team how to sell

Recruiting and sales have so much in common. At your next inter-viewer training, bring in your most seasoned sales leader to share their strategies for finding new business, building rapport, and ultimately getting their prospect to say yes.

62) Customize each hiring process with interview kits

Build these kits in Lever, and you can give each interviewer a set list of questions, change up scorecards according to role, and include additional info for interviewers to keep in mind. Remind your inter-viewers of all the important info you relayed at the beginning of your candidate search. And give your interview panel complementary questions, so your interviewee doesn’t have to repeat themselves five times over.

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To get the fastest feedback in the west (or east or north or south)...

63) Block 15 minutes on each interviewer’s calendar after the interview to get feedback in

Submitting feedback is a crucial part of the interview process. Help your interviewers allot time for it by including it in their interview invite, and save them from viewing feedback as an extra burden.

64) Automate interview feedback reminders

How frustrating is it to send your interviewers one message after another, pleading with them to submit feedback? Instead, set up au-tomated feedback reminders in your ATS. Bonus: Your interviewers will receive emails that don’t have your name on them, and you don’t have to be the bad guy.

65) Enforce a 24-hour feedback submission deadline

Ingrain this rule in your interviewers’ minds during interview train-ing, emphasize it in your interview kit, and reiterate it during your quarterly check-ins. Timely feedback is a crucial part of your recruit-ing success - you’ll update candidates faster and move them through your process more smoothly.

66) Give a gift card to the interviewer with the fastest feedback submission throughout each process

Everyone is motivated by gift cards, right? Encourage your interview-ers to log their feedback at record speed by rewarding the person who does it the fastest. You should be able to measure this right in your ATS!

67) Standardize 4-point ratings instead of 5

Don’t give interviewers a “neutral” or “middle” option - they may just sit on the fence. Instead, ask them to form an opinion. At Lever, we use the following categories: “1: Strong no hire”, “2: No hire”, “3: Hire”, and “4: Strong hire”.

68) Increase your technical interview efficiency with coding challenges

Coding-based assessment platforms like HackerRank and Codefights reduce the need to rely solely on resumes that can’t possibly capture all of your candidates’ qualifications. Evaluating candidates on their performance rather than experience will help you hire better and reduce interview bias.

69) Schedule a retrospective with all interviewers once you hire a hard-to-fill role

Debriefs can sometimes be stressful or time-consuming. Structure your post-mortem right, however, and it’ll save you time on your next candidate search. Ask questions like: ‘What went well in the pro-cess?’, ‘What went wrong?’, ‘How could we have filled the role more quickly?’, and ‘Where could we have found more qualified candi-dates?’.

70) Spotlight new hires at company-wide meetings

Take your whole team behind the hiring scenes by sharing facts about new hires’ interview processes before they join. Talk about their background, how they’ll impact the team, and what you learned in the process. At Lever we like to share the ‘turning point’ - the moment when the balance tipped in favor of the candidate joining the company - to help us recruit better in future.

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Closing candidates

71) Mail your candidate your snazziest company swag

To woo your candidate, surprise them. By sending them branded gear - like a cozy sweatshirt or socks - you’re relaying the message that you really want them to be a team member. In fact, you clearly already see them as one.

72) Collect and permanently log candidate compensation data

While it’s illegal in some regions to ask candidates about current compensation, you should still meticulously track information like your candidate’s expected compensation and their competitive offer details, all in one place. First, it will set your team up to give your candidate the most appropriate, competitive offer. Second, you’ll be able to use this data to inform how you compensate future candi-dates for the same role.

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73) Use one simple tool to conduct background checks

Background checks may be uninspiring, but they’re a necessary step in the interview process. With tools like GoodHire and Checkr, you can screen employees with exceptional speed and accuracy. Not only are these tools intuitive for the company, but they’re optimized for candidates as well.

74) Send a welcome email to new employees, GIF included

It takes 5 minutes or less to make a GIF, but they’re incredibly mean-ingful to candidates. Here at Lever, our recruiting team sends every new hire an email with a GIF of their future team cheering excitedly. And here’s the bonus: they include the entire company in the email. Then, every Leveroo sends a welcome email of their own - which often feature more hilarious GIFs. But this can be a closing strate-gy as well! Even if your candidate hasn’t yet said yes, you can still send them an email with a GIF and ask your team members to reply expressing their excitement.

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75) Uncover your candidate’s favorite hobby, and send them a photo of your whole team performing it

You can always give a big boost to your close with thoughtful gifts or gestures. Say your candidate’s favorite hobby is dancing - think about how much joy they’ll experience when they receive a photo of your whole team pretending they’re in a dance battle.

76) Send candidates a custom mug with their potential employee number

If you keep track of employee numbers on your team - i.e. the 33rd person to join your team is employee #33 - this gesture could be particularly meaningful. Send them something thoughtful and ever-lasting like a mug that reads “#45” so they know that you’re already reserving that spot for them.

77) Create a GIF saying “We want you!”

At Engagio, we make a team-wide GIF for candidates we want to join. It’s a personalized, light-hearted, and simple way to show amazing talent that they’re special. Our message is: we want you more than the other teams you’re considering, and we’re doing everything we can to make that clear.

VP of Sales, EngagioRay Carroll

78) Call to close - don’t email

Conversations are always more meaningful over the phone than by email. You can clear up any questions, hear the emotion in your candidate’s voice, and convey your excitement way more easily. It’s simple, but crucial. Pick up the phone every time you’re speaking to a candidate you’re pumped about. Email just won’t cut it.

79) Easily send offer approvals to hiring managers when filling out your offer template

Worry no longer about emailing your candidate’s future manager an approval form to fill out, or having to drop it on their desk. In Lever, sending that offer approval form is a step in creating your candidate offer letter.

80) Ask candidates to write their favorite snack on your interview sign-in sheet, and send it to them

When your candidate signs in for their final interview, have a box on the form that asks them for their favorite snack. That way, if you decide to send them a gift that shows that you’re thinking of them, you can mail their favorite one!

Hacks from

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Data-driven recruiting

81) A/B test your reach-outs

Experiment to see what’s engaging candidates. Try sending the same message for your hiring manager and as yourself, for example. Or try asking “Can we set up a 15 minute call this week?” at the end of one email, and be less pushy in another by asking “Would you be inter-ested in hearing more about the role?” in another. Subtle changes like these can sometimes make all the difference.

82) Use flexible requisitions and postings for headcount planning

Maybe you want to hire 10 people for one job posting, and five for another. No worries - in Lever, you can do both. It’s easy as can be to link multiple requisitions with one job posting, or multiple postings to a single requisition.

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83) Know your company’s high-level goals cold and tie your asks to them

If you’re in charge of hiring, have a clear grasp of your team’s overar-ching KPIs. That way, when you want to advocate for something like more budget to hire, you can directly tie that ask to a goal your team is invested in.

84) Regularly check your conversion rates throughout the process

Once a month, step back to look at the percentage of candidates who make it to the screening process, to an onsite, to offer, and to hire. Are your rates changing for better or worse? Where do you lose most candidates? What can you do differently to improve conversions? Sounds like a great topic for a team brainstorm.

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85) Reward teams or locations that have a faster time to hire quality candidates

When you hire exceptional talent more quickly, the benefits are in-numerable. You give those candidates a better experience, cut costs, and help your company experience their contributions sooner. Look in your ATS to uncover which team is moving the fastest and give them a small reward!

86) Publicly call out team members who are doubling down on the strategies that drive the most hires

Say you dig into your recruiting metrics to see that sourcing is your most successful recruiting strategy. Share that context with your team, and give regular kudos to the recruiters who are ramping up their sourcing efforts.

87) Initiate a team check-in once you know how workload is being distributed

In Lever, you can see which recruiters are screening and interview-ing an inordinate amount of candidates, and which team members aren’t as busy. Pull that information, then schedule a team meeting to discuss ways to redistribute the work.

88) Set goals for how many sourced hires you want in a given quarter, and plan a team offsite if you hit that number

Most people can get inspired by the promise of a celebration. If you discover that sourcing is the surest way to find high-quality candi-dates, motivate them by planning a team outing if together, you can source your target number of candidates.

89) Use interview calibration reports to identify bias in interviewer feedback

In Lever, you can identify patterns of negative vs. positive feedback from interviewers. Who is consistently rating candidates harshly? If you do notice a trend, we suggest proactively checking in with that particular interviewer. Perhaps there’s something they want to change about the candidates you’re sourcing.

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92) Build SLAs to get back to candidates faster

An SLA (service-level agreement) is essentially a standard that is set to get back to someone by a certain time. It usually relates to customer service functions, but we’ve explored it here to get back to candidates in a certain timeframe. If roles are taking too long to fill, look at the stages in your process where candidates stay the longest and install time limits to make a decision on a candidate within that stage quicker.

93) Schedule post-mortems to analyze recruiting data from the process

After a role is closed, I look in Lever Reports with my hiring manager to see where the process could be improved next time around. I like to look through interview feedback to see which key traits we should hone in on when hiring this position in the future, which data points weren’t looked at enough during the interviewing process, and which members of the interview panel had the most helpful and accurate insights to share. Conversion rates that don’t meet your benchmarks can also help diagnose specific stages of the process that might need to be reanalyzed for future hiring rounds.

90) Shift interviews that lead to a hire earlier in the process

This has the potential to seriously uplevel your overall success. In one specific instance, we found that every candidate who received a 1 or 2 for a live-coding, problem-solving session resulted in a non-hire after completing the exercise while on-site with us. We then changed our traditional hiring manager phone screen to include a piece of this session, so if a candidate failed the exercise, we knew it probably wasn’t worth the time to have them complete a full-on site. While it may filter out more candidates, it gave our hiring team a more solid data point to judge before moving a candidate to the next stage and helps maintain a higher bar for candidates we meet on-site. I really like using Lever’s interview feedback calibration to effectively do this.

91) Set annual KPIs for recruiting metrics

Establishing KPIs (key performance indicators) is crucial if you want to measure and improve success. I suggest setting pipeline speed and offer acceptance rate KPIs because they’re pretty simple yet they measure both the effectiveness and efficiency of your recruiting process. The quicker the better when interviewing and closing candi-dates, and pipeline speed helps track that. The acceptance rate is a good measure of how well your process delivers candidates that are a good mutual fit for the role, and then how well you convince those candidates to join. There are countless other metrics you can track, but these act as great vital signs for your recruiting efforts. Check in on them monthly to make sure you’re on track to hit your annual goals.

Recruiting Specialist, LevelUpPat MoreyHacks from

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Diversity recruiting

94) State your commitment to building a diverse and inclusive culture on your careers page

Even if you just add one simple sentence, you can send a strong mes-sage to your applicants. Add it at the end to your job descriptions too to drive the point home!

95) Conduct blind resume screenings

This will help you minimize unconscious biases. Studies have shown that people with ethnic names need to send out more resumes before they get a callback, and that resumes with female names are rated lower than ones with male names when all other things on a resume are equal.

96) Ban “culture fit” as a reason for rejecting a candidate

When interviewers want to reject candidates for “culture fit”, or a “gut feeling”, it’s an indication that unconscious bias is at play. Challenge your interviewers to articulate a more specific explanation – it’s a great way to uncover hidden biases and have open conversa-tions about them (never punish or shame people – we are all inher-ently biased a little bit!).

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97) Explicitly request a diverse range of referrals

Challenge your employees to think beyond the obvious – past their three best friends that may or may not be all from the same demo-graphic. Emphasize that diversity requires deliberate effort, and it’s something all employees can help with – by making introductions to great people they know, even if they don’t fit the “traditional” profile. It only makes the team stronger in the long run.

98) Ensure that underrepresented employees are included in your interviews

But don’t overload them either. As much as candidates want to meet with their diverse potential coworkers, if your one female engineer is in every single interview panel, it’s not fair to her performance and sanity either.

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99) Check the temperature of your office

The temperature in most buildings defaults to what’s most comfort-able for men. It’s entirely possible that some of your candidates can’t even be comfortable in their interview without shivering slightly and thinking about how cold they are. Planning outfits for interviews is stressful enough - don’t force them to scour their closet for that per-fect mix of warm but formal attire before their next onsite.

100) Stray away from oddball questions like “How many golf balls would fit inside a 747 airplane?”

Brain teasers and off-the-cuff questions have been found to be not that helpful in predicting great hires vs. those who need to be rejected. Instead, map out structured interviews (planned questions, asked across multiple candidates) with behavioral questions. Focus on the “why” and “how” to learn about the candidate – what their strengths/weaknesses are, as well as how they learn and prob-lem-solve.

101) Intersect your conversion rates with the demographic data collected through Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) questions

Remember that conversion rate is the answer to a question like: “What percentage of resumes submitted are moved to phone screen?”. And what’s demographic data? It’s as simple as the optional set of EEO questions that can be enabled in Lever. Try examining these data points together. For example, you might find that underrepresented candidates are passing phone screens, but

falling off after on-site panels at a disproportionately high rate. This tells you there may be some sort of bias in a particular stage. With this information, you can put on your detective hat: maybe it’s an untrained interviewer turning those candidates off, or it’s the types of questions that are unfair to a specific group. Either way, time to investigate and take some action.

102) Change the reading materials you have in your lobby

If you’re going to provide magazines, try to make sure them relevant to your industry as opposed to clearly gendered options. Unless you’re in fashion, GQ probably doesn’t belong in your lobby.

103) Print inclusive bathroom signs

Lever’s bathroom doors have a sticker that says “For those who iden-tify as,” above the mens and womens signs. Try doing the same! The smallest bit of writing can send a strong message to future hires.

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We forgot to mention one thing we love about hacks: they’re easy to start applying today. Though after reading all 103 of these, you’ve ideally gath-ered that already. But with so many hacks to choose from, where do you start? We recom-mend going back through the chapters above and choosing a couple from each one to tackle. And teamwork. We recommend teamwork. Share this ebook with your colleagues, and ask them to start applying these hacks too.

A huge thanks goes to our hacks contributors, without whom this ebook would have been impossible. Cheers to Medallia’s Ariel Jolo, Netflix’s Tennyson Jones, Thread’s Melissa Trahan, Whisper’s Michelle Hart, Engagio’s Ray Carroll, LevelUp’s Pat Morey, and Stacy Zapar from Tenfold & The Talent Agency for making us all a bit more savvy.

Built from the conviction that recruiting is the responsibility of everyone at the company, Lever’s Talent Acquisition Suite draws the entire team togeth-er to efficiently source, nurture, interview, and hire top talent through ef-fortless collaboration. Incorporating best-of-breed automation, intelligence and design, Lever helps employers develop stronger candidate relation-ships in fewer clicks, by combining powerful ATS and CRM functionality in one modern platform.

Lever was founded in 2012 and supports the hiring needs of over 1,400 leading companies around the globe including the teams at Netflix, Lyft, Hot Topic, and Cirque du Soleil. With an overall gender ratio of 50:50, Lever is also fiercely committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversi-ty and inclusion. For more information, visit https://www.lever.co.

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