Corporate Recruiters can be Office Heroes too. Here’s How:

I used to dread Fridays.
While the rest of the company was hoisting their coffee cups on Friday morning in reverence to the coming weekend, I had dread. Friday was the day that I had to turn in my recruiting status report. The report would be reviewed the following Monday at 9:00am by the executive staff at their weekly meeting. Depending on how busy I was during the week, the report would take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours to complete. Instead of hitting up happy hour with the sales team on Friday afternoon, I was knee deep in a spreadsheet. And, I know that I wasn’t the only one frustrated on status report day. There are thousands of recruiters that bristle at the thought of compiling status reports and wasting time exacting data instead of actually recruiting talent.

So, why has compiling status reports been such a burden for corporate recruiters? Well, to date, the challenge with providing reports has been exacerbated by existing applicant tracking tools that fail to reflect the realities of the recruiting process. If you look at what vendors in the ATS marketplace are producing currently, it’s clear that they are still focused on what they’ve always been pushing: developing highly cumbersome data repositories with a bunch of check-box features, none of which are designed to make reporting performance metrics any easier. Let’s be real: the harden an ATS is to use, the harder it is to get any information out of it. And, if you do manage to get some workable data after hours of effort, you’ll end up with spreadsheets that look like Da Vinci’s code.

As many of you know, Newton’s core team is made up of former corporate and RPO recruiters. We understand as well as anyone that corporate recruiters are certainly not the only ones responsible for the success of recruiting programs, but they are typically left holding the bag. We also know that a lack of systemic accountability costs corporate recruiting departments money, time and resources and often leads to animosity and plenty of petty misunderstandings. Only the consistent capture and reporting of real data can back up a responsible recruiter and ultimately allow them to be more than just purely tactical or only as good as their last placement.

Good news for corporate recruiters.
There’s no need to be a victim of reporting madness on Fridays any longer. In fact, we may give you reason to throw on a cape and wow people with your reporting superpowers. Check out Newton’s custom reporting engine, a powerful tool that makes generating reports refreshingly easy. It’s not just easy to use: similar to Newton’s real-time analytics dashboard, this new tool spits out reports that are digestible, even a bit flashy. If you’re a data junky (or your manager is) the Newton custom reporting engine is like kryptonite.

Our new reporting engine empowers users to build, save and share customized reports comprised of every piece of data collected during the recruiting process. Users can generate reports on talent pipelines, user activity, requisitions, advertising performance, interview statistics, hires and more. Reports are easily built with Newton’s drag and drop interface and exported to auto-formatted spreadsheets that are production quality and ready to share with anyone. And, processing large amounts of data will not cause latency for users because the reports are generated from a reports-specific database in the Cloud. The new reporting feature even enables users to save the report structure created by an individual user so that the report can be run anytime with the click of a button. Think weekly staffing report with one click!

There’s more to come.
2011 will continue to be busy year for Newton’s product team and another great year for customers. Our custom reporting engine is just one of several important features that we’ll release this year. Our idea has always been to build the most innovative corporate applicant tracking software and we’re constantly studying the evolving recruiting marketplace so we can meet and even exceed the needs of modern recruiting programs. At the end of the day, the most rewarding part of our business is providing the tools corporate recruiters need to rise above the challenges that can plague their roles (and performance). Can we really give you superpowers? Maybe not. But we know Newton can make recruiters more effective, save them time, and elevate them into the strategic roles that can, on some days, make them heroic.

How to Choose Applicant Tracking Software to Ensure OFCCP Compliance

Since May 2006, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has been enforcing a landmark ruling that sets explicit regulations on the collection, storage and reporting of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data for internet applicants. It also defines internet applicants, identifies electronic data collection methods, creates basic qualification standards and establishes recordkeeping requirements for compliance.

While OFCCP regulations are specifically for companies with federal contracts, it is the responsibility of every employer to eliminate discrimination in their hiring process.  It is not enough to just consult an attorney (which clearly should be step 1).  In today’s world, where applicants can easily apply to hundreds of openings with a few mouse clicks and each job attracts hundreds of candidates, using a spreadsheet to track all of this information is possible (maybe) but ensuring its accuracy or drawing any insight out of this information is impossible. Regardless, manually tracking this information has gotten increasingly more cumbersome and maintaining the integrity of this data has been riddled with human error (transcribing information from one form to another) as the volume of recruiting data continues to increase.

To help ensure that your company remains compliant with these types of government regulations, your organization should be storing, tracking, and analyzing hiring information with a solution that can handle large amounts of data while minimizing the need to copy information from one form to another. As such, this solution must have these 4 critical capabilities: ask every potential employee to identify their EEO info, capture the reasons why your employees have chosen NOT to hire someone (every time), continuously analyze this information in real-time and be able to create reports that you can use for compliance reporting.

But there is good news. Tracking the information that can help your company stay in compliance, perhaps even reduce hiring discrimination, has really never been easier….as long as you choose the right recruiting software vendor.  Be careful, shop around and ask the right questions because not every vendor understands these regulations (and most have incomplete applications that will cause you to have gaps in your program).

What questions do you ask of your ATS vendor?

So, what should you be looking for? Here is a list of things that you need to consider. My first piece of advice is when choosing applicant tracking software make sure you not only ask the right questions; also take the time to see the feature in action, live, so you really know how everything works. This is important stuff; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.

Request EEO information for every job from your careers page. Just about any applicant tracking system will include a feature that requests voluntary EEO information from applicants during the online application process. If it doesn’t, don’t buy it. A good looking, fully-branded careers site, that displays your EEO disclaimer and asks for voluntary EEO/AA information should be easy to set up and simple to manage without support from IT.

Automatically capture “reasons for non-selection” for every applicant. Here’s where the rubber really meets the road. OFCCP regulations require employers to capture a reason for non-selection for every candidate they receive. When evaluating recruiting software, you MUST determine how it will capture reasons for non-selection. This information is critical and most legacy applicant tracking systems have no way of capturing this data. Those that do, often require you and your team to take time consuming extra steps and force you to enter loads of data manually. Choose a system that enables everyone in your company to easily, accurately and automatically capture pre-selected reasons for non-selection without creating extra steps in your recruiting process.

Ask minimum qualification question for every job. Asking minimum qualifications is best accomplished during the online application process. When applicants do not meet a job’s minimum qualifications the government does not require you to track them as an applicant. Choose recruiting software that allows you to automate this process, and you’ll save time by ensuring that you are processing only the applicants that are qualified for your jobs. A smart recruiting system will store each applicant’s minimum qualification answers with their record and will allow you to remove candidates of this type from your applicant flow logs automatically.

Create applicant flow logs automatically for any job. Every federal contractor must generate applicant flow logs that record all the information required by the OFCCP regulations for conducting an adverse impact analysis. If an applicant tracking system is already tracking all the relevant information that comprises a flow log (data received, name, position, job group, race and sex, veterans status, reason for non-selection, date of hire), generating a report should be simple. Ideally choose recruiting technology that’ll allow you to export applicant flow logs into the same form that you’ll send to the OFCCP.

Create Hire/Offer Logs instantly. The purpose of this report is to record each hire or job offer made by your company during the reporting period being analyzed as part of your affirmative action plan.  Again, you’ll want to select software that automatically tracks all the required information to fulfill the OFCCP’s requirements (date of hire, date of offer, job title, job group, gender, ethnicity, race, veterans’ status). Creating a report should take one or two clicks, and should allow you to export the report to Excel.

Audit your EEO statistics anytime from an online dashboard. Now, it’s up to you to monitor and regularly audit your EEO/AA data. Proactive assessment and management can prevent costly litigation. Purchasing software that allows to view EEO data online and to generate custom reports is essential and is a good way to take preventative steps against risks. Make sure that you have access to all of your EEO/AA data, so you can ensure that your company is indeed an equal opportunity employer.

Finally, you’d probably expect that recruiting software that will capture, track and report EEO/OFCCP data automatically would be expensive and difficult to implement. But, thanks to new delivery methods and even newer business models, there’s technology available that you can set up in a matter of days and will only cost a few hundred dollars per month. Compared to the cost of a discrimination lawsuit, this is a no-brainer. So, get educated, know what you need to track, kick some tires, do the demos and choose modern recruiting software that can turn your OFCCP headache into nothing more than just another thing you’ve got under control.