How to use meeting intelligence and meeting collaboration to improve your recruitment process?

Hiring is one of the toughest challenges—especially if you are a growing SMB organization. And even when you are able to attract the right talent to your company, it can be hard to retain them if you aren’t giving them the right experience.

Just look at these stats from various sources for comparison:

• 63% of job seekers are likely to reject a job offer due to bad candidate experience - SoftwareAdvice
• 83% of job seekers say that a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company - LinkedIn Business Solutions
  

What these stats communicate is—recruiting is exactly like creating a brand experience for customers. Potential candidates are weighing your brand through every possible touchpoint—be it your online job posts, social media page, or in-person interviews. A seemingly small mistake or the lack of a proper system can jeopardize your chances of acquiring the best talents.

Besides using a plethora of recruitment software technologies that are out there, you can organically improve your hiring process and experience by learning from the interviews you conduct. Use a meeting intelligence tool to record, transcribe, summarize and analyze all your interview conversations, and build a culture of continuous learning.

In this blog post, we will discuss:

• The most common issues in the recruitment process
• Why should you use a meeting intelligence and collaboration platform for recruitment
• How to leverage meeting intelligence and collaboration to improve the recruitment process

The most common issues in recruitment

There are several factors that add to the complexity of finding and hiring the best people for appropriate roles for your company. Here are some of the top issues that are universally common across all organizations:

1. Not setting the right expectations

It’s unbelievable how common this problem is. Monster—a global job portal—ran a survey some time back and found that:

• 2,030 job seekers avoided applying to jobs that included mistakes in the copy or sloppy editing
• 64% of respondents said they didn’t respond to job ads with a poorly written or confusing job title
• 60% of them said that they found jargon in job ads “annoying”
  

Creating effective job descriptions is a big struggle for most businesses even in 2021. But the problem doesn’t stop at bad language or formatting errors. Poorly worded job ads lack clarity and fail to communicate the right message.

Most job adverts fail to set the right expectations in terms of the roles and responsibilities, the skills and experiences expected out of the candidate, preferred qualifications, and so on.

2. Poor role-candidate fit

Recruitment costs a lot of time and money—and the stakes double when you hire the wrong person for the wrong role. In some companies, the recruiters don’t really understand the expectations of the recruitment team that they are working for. As a result, they sometimes end up sourcing candidates from their existing pool of applicants from related roles (which in most cases aren’t going to be a good-fit).

For instance, oftentimes HR business partners get candidates for the open positions of product marketing managers from their existing database of content marketing managers because they don’t understand the nuanced differences between the two roles. This is an example of a bad role-candidate fit.

3. Poor interview handoff experience

Another key aspect of an interview process is the organization’s ability to smoothly transition the interview candidates from one round to another. And the transition aspect is not just about scheduling the interview rounds, but also about ensuring that there is no context lost in the process. For example, you don’t want your panelists to ask the same set of questions if the candidate has already answered that in one of their previous rounds. Lack of coordination and context sharing leads candidates to form negative perceptions about the employer brand. And that’s the last thing you want to let happen.

Lack of coordination and context sharing leads candidates to form negative perceptions about the employer brand. And that’s the last thing you want to let happen.

4. Cut-throat competition for high demand roles

Most of the problems we discussed above are caused due to the lack of operational efficiency—and we will talk about how to overcome them in the next section. Besides that, sometimes it’s hard to get the right people to join your ship just because of the fierce competition between companies to attract the best minds—especially for high-demand roles such as programmers with a specific skill set, customer success managers, or product marketing managers.

There isn’t really an easy fix for this problem. But if you can streamline other areas of your hiring process and can offer a great candidate experience, it becomes easy for you to stand out in the competition. That’s because 81% of candidates share their positive candidate experience with family, friends, and peers.

Why use a meeting intelligence and collaboration platform for hiring

A candidate’s hiring experience turns subpar when the hiring process is siloed and riddled with communication gaps across all stakeholders. To fix this problem, you need a robust process that unifies the data across the board and gives everyone equal access to valuable information. This is where a meeting intelligence and collaboration platform helps the cause.

What is meeting intelligence software and how it helps in hiring?

A meeting intelligence software records, transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes your online meetings—and that includes the interviews and conversations with candidates you are evaluating to hire. 

The collaborative aspect of the software enables you to turn these conversations into a searchable knowledge base that anyone in your organization can access, share, or collaborate on. 

This helps the hiring managers, recruiters, and HR Business Partners (HRBPs) to gain deeper visibility into the interview process, create smooth feedback loops between the panelists, and improve the overall recruitment process.

Essentially, leveraging meeting intelligence and collaboration helps you build a seamless and robust hiring process.

Alignment between hiring teams and the HRBP:

‍It all starts with the alignment between the hiring manager and the HRBP. For example, you can use Avoma to record the meeting between the hiring manager and the HRBP where they reach a consensus on the expectations of the role, what the candidate's background needs to be, seniority of the role, etc. The meeting gets transcribed, summarized and becomes a clear baseline for the recruiters to start sourcing candidates accordingly.​​

Meeting Intelligence for course correction:

‍As you record all the interview conversations, it becomes easier for the entire panel to course correct wherever needed. Here are some examples:

1. The talent acquisition teams can listen to interview conversations between the candidates and the hiring panelists. It helps them understand the gap between the hiring panel expectations and the expertise of the candidates sourced. Therefore, listening to these conversations will help the talent sourcing team to shortlist candidates that fit the expectations better.
2. The interview panelists can listen to the recordings of the candidates’ previous discussion rounds so that they have better context of the candidates. It also ensures that they don’t repeat the points discussed in the previous rounds so that the overall discussion progresses seamlessly.

3. Panelists can share certain snippets of their interview conversations with peers or the recruiting team to throw spotlight on a topic discussed that needs attention.

Collaboration for feedback and seamless handoff:

Given that we operate in a remote world, there are chances of having too many meetings (internal as well as interviews) as part of the recruitment process. The collaborative platform in Avoma allows you to comment on parts of the conversation to offer feedback between your cross-functional teams (in this case, recruiters and hiring managers) so that you can make feedback meetings redundant. In fact, you can comment your way to seamlessly handing off the candidate from one interview round to another, with ample context of the conversation so far.

How to leverage a meeting intelligence and collaboration tool to improve the process

From the discussion so far, it’s obvious that recruitment is not (also cannot be) an HR-specific function. It’s a highly collaborative process and too critical for you to rely solely on HR or a few hiring managers. Let’s look at some steps that can be used to improve the hiring process.

1. Bring clarity about the role

The hiring process varies from company to company—and sometimes, from one team to another. You can’t just take a generalized approach to hiring by copying another company’s job posts and job descriptions.

Here’s an example of a job description that is overly generalized, jargon-heavy, and convoluted in its attempt to attract the right aspirants for the role.

Here’s another example of a job description from a company called Workday that does an exceptional job of articulating the expectations from the ideal candidate:

‍

How do you get this level of clarity on your job posts? By leveraging your internal dialogues between the hiring teams and the HRBP. Imagine a sales leader and an HRBP talking about the need for hiring a new account executive in one of their meetings. 

Once they hash out every detail about the job role and their conversation recording becomes available on Avoma, it makes everyone’s job better.

It helps the HRBP get a crystal-clear picture of the problem that exists in the sales team and craft a suitable job description that aligns close to the actual requirements—as opposed to spinning a job description they might download from the internet. They can also exchange notes with their talent acquisition experts so that they source the best-fit candidates.

2. Run great interviews

Before we delve deeper into this topic, consider this stat from a LinkedIn survey—about 83% of job seekers say that a negative interview experience can change their minds about the employer brand. That’s a staggering percentile of candidates giving their thumbs down to bad job interviews.

On the other hand, good interviews are like good, firm handshakes. But when they come across as half-hearted or uninspiring, the response from the job applicants is also equally lukewarm.

Thankfully, interviews can be great if you put some planning into it. Avoma makes it really easy for you to create a meeting agenda template and add it to the template library, so that you don’t have to create a fresh agenda everytime. You can create agenda templates for interviews based on specific roles—the idea is to create a list of points you want to cover in the interview, and not make it an interview script.

These templates also help you make your interview process simple, repeatable, and scalable.

3. Build feedback loops

Now that we have looked at creating templates to conduct interviews at scale and also the advantages of recording the interview—the next step is to learn from the conversations and enable a closed feedback loop.

Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you want to communicate to one of your interview panelists that they ask more open-ended questions to get a better understanding of how the candidate thinks.

Now, you don’t have to schedule another call with your peers to share this feedback. You can simply select a part of their conversation and offer your feedback.

Over time, the feedback loop helps everyone on the panel get a nuanced understanding of what’s required so that the everyones makes the best of the interview time. And most importantly, clarity of thought improves the overall hiring experience.

4. Deliver a seamless candidate experience

Offering an optimal candidate experience is not just important to hire great people and retain them for the long haul, but is also critical to improve your chances of employee referrals in the future.

More often than not, a brand’s reputation suffers when its right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing. Therefore, the best way to create a flawless hiring experience is to tighten the alignment between the internal teams.

Eventually, the shared intelligence that comes from using a meeting intelligence tool to record, transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations molds everyone to work as one team across functions.

5. Make each interview a learning experience

Job interviews have more than one purpose to serve. Of course, you use them to screen job applicants, test them to see how well they align with your company’s needs, and choose the best candidate from a wider pool of talent. At a deeper level, job interviews—or any external meetings for that matter—also double as a rich resource to gather information about your brand, your competition, and the industry that you operate in.

When used in conjunction with a meeting intelligence and collaboration tool, you can extract clear takeaways from each one of them to improve your operations. For instance, if you interview five candidates for the position of senior customer success manager, you might start seeing patterns of what others in your domain are doing based on the candidates' responses.

Final words

Recruitment is one area where you can never be sure of getting things right all the time no matter how hard you try. Sometimes, the effectiveness of the recruitment process also depends on external factors like the demand of the role you are hiring for, lack of skilled professionals in that role, or the kind of people who apply for the position. But by learning from your past conversations/interviews, you can continuously improve the hiring/ recruitment process one day at a time.

If you want to maximize your chances of getting the right person through the door, try making the most of your past interview conversations by learning from them.