Talent Acquisition 2017

HOW TO ADDRESS

THE SKILLS SHORTAGE

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Talent Acquisition Leaders rank the skills shortage as their biggest hiring challenge.

Turns out, word choices in job descriptions are the real problem.

A recent survey by Talent Tech Labs just identified the number one concern for Talent Acquisition Leaders: the pervasive skills shortage. Among professionals who work for companies that hire more than 1,000 people per year, 69% cite the skills shortage as their greatest concern. The percentage increases in larger companies. Among professionals who work for companies that hire more than 2,500 people per year, 80% cite the skills shortage as their number one hiring challenge.1

So how do companies deal with the skills shortage today? Unfortunately, mostly by paying more for talent. Paying higher salaries gives a recruiting edge. And when internal recruiting efforts come up short, companies often pay third-party recruiters 30% of the first year’s salary to fill skilled jobs. Companies are also throwing more money to expand the recruitment net with social media and increased Internet outreach.

The increasing cost of recruitment and higher job salaries has a significant impact on company profitability. Further

1 2017 State of Talent Acquisition Technology, Talent Tech Labs, p. 6

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spending to address the skills shortage by paying more is potentially unsustainable.

Fortunately, there is a great solution to addressing the perceived skills shortage. Companies are learning to look outside the typical pools that employers have historically considered. Once you broaden your search to include women, underrepresented minorities, and people who didn’t graduate from the top schools (which has been shown not to predict job performance), you have an entire skilled talent pool available that was previously unconsidered.

However, the key to attracting a broader, more qualified applicant pool of women and minorities lies mainly in the language used in the job description. But before we address how to write inclusive job descriptions that attract the broadest pool of candidates, let’s prove that there is an abundant pool of skilled talent out there that can fit your company.

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Skilled Workers are Available

One area where Talent Acquisition Leaders express significant concern about a skills shortage is for people with bachelor’s degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math—the so-called STEM jobs.

In fact, in their 2016 reports to the U.S. Department of Labor, seven of the nine states with high-quality data (California, Colorado, Missouri, New York, Rhode Island, Washington, and Connecticut) all reported serious concern about filling tech jobs over the next few years.2 But consider a few data points.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while STEM graduates are more likely than other college graduates to have a job, nearly 75% of all holders of bachelor’s degrees in STEM disciplines don’t have jobs in STEM occupations.3

Drilling down, researchers conclude that skilled women and skilled minorities account for a significant percentage of the missing science, technology, engineering, and math workers.

Data shows that women make up 20% of engineering

2 Rachael Stephens, “Mind the Gap: The State of Skills in the U.S.” Third Way, http://www.thirdway.org/report/mind-the-gap-the-state-of-skills-in-the-us July 10, 2017.

3 U.S. Census Bureau, “Where do college graduates work? A Special Focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math,” https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html July 10, 2014.

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graduates. However, nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees never enter the profession or quit—all due to lack of access to career opportunities.4

According to American Community Survey data, only 16% of African-American graduates and 12% of Hispanics with computer science and engineering degrees go into tech jobs (compared to 40% of Asians).5

At the top 25 undergraduate programs, nearly 9% of graduates are African-American and Hispanic. However technical workers at the largest tech companies, according to the companies’ diversity reports, are on average only 3% Hispanic and 1% black.6

And this underemployment trend isn’t just for STEM jobs. Overall, black college graduates are unemployed at twice the rate of white college graduates. In 2016, that meant that 9.4% of African-American graduates were unemployed.7

Skilled women and minorities are available. The key is how to attract them to your company.

4 Susan S. Silbey, “Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field?” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field August 23, 2016.

5 Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller, “Why Tech Degrees Are Not Putting More Blacks and Hispanics Into Tech Jobs,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruiting-pipeline-for-lack-of-diversity-in-tech.html?_r=0 Feb. 25, 2016.

6 Ibid.

7 Elise Gould and Tanyell Cooke, “Unemployment For Young Black Grads Is Still Worse Than It Was For Young White Grads In The Aftermath Of The Recession.” Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/publication/unemployment-for-young-black-grads-is-still-worse-than-it-was-for-young-white-grads-in-the-aftermath-of-the-recession/ May 11, 2016.

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Writing Inclusive Job Descriptions

Academic research and real-world case studies find that writing inclusive job descriptions that balance male and female-leaning terms is the key to attracting the broadest possible audience.

Consider the following sentences from a job description. Which do you think appeals to more women?

Research shows that when women read job-descriptions with too many masculine-leaning words, they get the message that they will not fit the job or do not belong within that company’s culture—even when they have the skills needed to do the job.8

The key to writing an inclusive job description is you don’t have to eliminate all the masculine-leaning words, just include a balance of terms that lean feminine to signal that everyone who is qualified is welcomed.

8 Kay, Aaron. “The impact of Talent Sonar and inclusive job descriptions on job appeal.” Duke University Working Paper. (2016).

Strong communication and influencing skills. Ability to perform individually in a competitive environment.Superior ability to satisfy customers.

Proficient oral and written communication skills. Collaborates well in a team environment. Sensitive to clients’ needs, can develop warm client relationships.

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Using Technology to Optimize Human Decisions

Recognizing the importance of writing inclusive job descriptions to attract the broadest pool of qualified candidates, Talent Sonar created an artificial intelligence tool that instantly analyzes job descriptions, scores them on an inclusion balance scale, highlights key words, and recommends synonyms that will quickly improve the attractiveness of the job description for more people.

The real-world results have been amazing. On the high-end, a recruiter for Nike noted a 700% increase in the number of qualified resumes for a software engineering job that had attracted 7 and 9 applicants in two previous attempts. Using Talent Sonar’s inclusive job description AI to improve the job listing brought in 49 qualified resumes—plenty to select a fantastic candidate for the job.

Attracts primarily white male applicants

-37

Attracts broader, more diverse applicant pool

+2

Talent Sonar’s Job Description Score for Inclusive Vs.

Exclusive Terms

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On the more typical end of the scale, Talent Sonar optimized job descriptions shot applications up by 30%, and the percentage of women among RedSeal’s three-dozen engineers doubled.

A Biotech division of one the largest global pharmaceutical companies wanted to broaden the diversity of its candidate slate for a Security Manager job that for years had only attracted white male applicants. With Talent Sonar they quickly improved the job description from a -37 on the inclusive term scale to a +2.

Including a job mission statement that “they will be passionate that the company’s employees and assets are never in harm’s way” scored high for inclusion and

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attracted the cultural fit the company desired. For the first time, the BioTech firm received resumes from women and minority security professionals who were qualified to guide a team of 25+ security guards.

One of the surprising learnings from companies using Talent Sonar is that inclusive job descriptions not only attract more women and minorities but also more white men.

The reason appears to be that a significant number of white men are not attracted to alpha male “work hard, play hard” language and actually prefer inclusive language.

Turns out, balancing the male and female-leaning terms in a job description creates an environment where everyone, regardless of race or gender, can see themselves fitting in.

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But What Happens After the Resumes Come In?

Inclusive Job Descriptions is the most important step to attracting a broader, more qualified applicant pool to address the skills shortage, but as any Talent Acquisition Leader knows, it’s only one step in the hiring process.

Two more steps have proven essential in addressing the skills shortage: Identity-Blind Resume Review and Structured Interviews. Fortunately, Talent Sonar AI-assisted technology can speed the process here too.

Why Identity-Blind Resume Review?A funny thing happens when resumes come in. People naturally gravitate to the familiar. They lean toward names they recognize and schools they know, and maybe even the gender of the person who did the job before—all of which research shows has no correlation on whether a person will succeed in a job.

These studies that confirm this human behavior are called “resume audit studies.” They’ve been done hundreds of times across different companies, industries, and job types. Researchers send out hundreds to thousands of resumes to different companies. The resumes are identical except for one variable: the name.

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9 Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Brendan More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination.” University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business Working Paper (2002).

10 Rivera, Lauren A., and András Tilcsik. “Class Advantage, Commitment Penalty: The Gendered Effect Of Social Class Signals In An Elite Labor Market.” American Sociological Review 81.6 (2016): 1097-1131.

Research finds that the mainstream names are currently considered more employable. For example, Jamal got 50% fewer callbacks than Brendan for the same resume. In fact, in a University of Chicago study, the researchers had to give Jamal 8 more years of experience to get an equal rate of callbacks! Again, the only difference in the resume was the name.9

Gender also plays a role when resumes are evaluated. For example, a 2016 study found college-educated women received 56% fewer callbacks than men at 300 top law firms.10

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11 Goldin, Claudia and Cecilia Rouse. “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact Of ‘Blind’ Auditions On Female Musicians,” American Economic Review, 2000, v90 (4,Sep), 715-741.

As another indication of how powerful this technique can be, professional orchestras increased the number of female musicians from 5% to 50% just by having candidates audition behind a blind.11

Identity-blind resume review addresses the skills shortage by hiding the name, gender, and implied ethnicity to allow hiring teams to focus on the qualifications necessary to succeed in the job.

Talent Sonar’s identity-blind resume review AI not only hides personal identifiers but prompts resume reviewers to score each resume for the skills most essential to the job. This comparative resume evaluation leads to more qualified hires.

Why Structured Interviews?You’ve attracted the broadest pool of talent, you’ve scored your resumes to identify the most skilled slate of candidates to interview, now you have to identify who best fits your company’s values and is most qualified for the job by bringing people in for interviews.

In a structured interview, questions are preplanned in advance so every candidate is asked the same questions and can be scored comparatively.

Research finds structured interviews lead to more consistent and accurate candidate evaluations, resulting

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12 Levashina, Julia, et al. “The structured employment interview: Narrative and quantitative review of the research literature.” Personnel Psychology 67.1 (2014): 241-293.

13 Levashina, Julia, et al. “The Structured Employment Interview: Narrative And Quantitative Review Of The Research Literature.” Personnel Psychology 67.1 (2014): 241-293.

in more qualified hires. In fact, structured interviews are two times more effective in identifying the most qualified candidate for a job.12

As Talent Sonar sociologist, Liz Kofman says, “The research shows, if a company isn’t doing structured interviews, they may as well be throwing darts at their top resumes.”

In some ways, throwing darts may be fairer than what naturally occurs during an unstructured interview.

Research shows that African-American and Hispanic applicants receive ratings that are, on average, 25% lower when unstructured interviews are used. Any unconscious bias is mitigated to 10% when structured interviews are used.13

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Talent Sonar’s tool allows for interviewers to capture feedback and score interviews in real-time. Scoring can then be revealed after everyone provides their independent evaluations of a candidate.

Research finds when interviewers know their candidate evaluations are going to be shared with their peers, interviewers are more likely to focus on what is important for the role and less likely to fall back on personal biases and distractions like shared hobbies that do not correlate to job success.

Combining interview scores from the entire team also results in more qualified hires by relying on the wisdom of the group to easily identify the highest-scoring candidates.

Structured Interviews also have the added benefit of providing a better experience for both the Interviewer and the candidate. The interviewer doesn’t have to wing an interview or rely on their gut. They look prepared and professional.

After using Talent Sonar for structured interviews, Marc Caputo, an internal recruiter for Nike reported that interviewers, “liked having the structure. Normally the feedback I get is that they don’t really know what to do. Now they felt really prepared.”

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Faster Time to Hire

Talent Sonar has built an easy to use tool that integrates directly into a company’s applicant tracking system to optimize hiring decisions. The final benefit to following these simple hiring best practices is not only finding the right fit for each position but finding that right person faster.

Real world data shows that companies using inclusive job descriptions report an average decrease in time to hire of 16 days. Using Talent Sonar, they have found an easy way to overcome the skills shortage.

We invite you to optimize your company’s hiring by trying Talent Sonar for free today at www.talentsonar.com.

If you have any questions about Talent Sonar or would like to further discuss the best practices in hiring, contact us at:

info@talentsonar.com 650.260.4476