Save time scheduling phone screens
May 30, 2017
3 tools to help you find and hire great candidates
August 14, 2017
When Karen, the host of the event, asked if I wanted to lead a track at TRU Tel Aviv, I honestly didn’t think it would happen. While I obviously said yes, I kept expecting something to happen that would keep me from attending. Maybe it’s because I’ve never travelled outside of Europe so the prospect of going to Israel seemed quite unreal. And yet as I’m writing this, I’m sitting at a beautiful beach in Tel Aviv thinking about all the people I met at the event and the discussions I had with them.
The agenda included a number of interesting discussions but as usually at tru events, I wasn’t able to get to all of them distracted by the discussions in the corridors of the beautiful venue with other people attending. After all, it’s not just about making it to a track, it’s mostly about meeting new people to broaden your horizons.
That being said I made it to some and thought I’d share some of my thoughts here:
Bill Boorman: Trump, Brexit and all that
Somehow I haven’t made it to this track from Bill before. I have to say it was quite fascinating to hear ideas around targeting different audiences and how important timing is when communicating with them. This first discussion of the day involved Bill walking us through how targeting and messaging are used in politics and how this can inspire recruiters to be more efficient.
The one takeaway I found most useful: people care about things, but not everyone cares about the same things. Targeting your candidates based on what they find important in general never works as well as identifying different groups within your target audience. Some of your candidates will care about work-life balance, others about the location they work at etc. The most important challenge of communicating with candidates at a larger scale isn’t identifying who to communicate with, but which elements of your message they will care most about.
Miri Gal Bort: General challenges in global sourcing and recruitment
I was absolutely inspired by this session, in which we discussed some of the most difficult challenges the participants faced at work. We started with a short introduction and moved to case studies where anyone could present their challenge and have the group share ideas on how to solve it. It wasn’t surprising a lot of them involved engineering profiles and we covered anything from sourcing more candidate profiles to improving response rates.
The one takeaway I found most useful: sourcers often aren’t provided with the best tools to do their job. While most companies are happy to pay for a premium LinkedIn account, they wouldn’t consider paying for other sourcing tools. Sourcers have to learn to influence those decisions by presenting a case for the tools they need. This can be done by researching specific tools through trial periods or in collaboration with other users.
Speaking of collaboration we discussed how identifying the best sourcing resources and job boards in different geographical areas often represents a huge challenge for sourcers. This is how the group came up with the idea of creating a spreasheet of such tools globally that we could all work on together. You can find the file with the global sourcing resources here – if you have other sourcing platforms or job boards you want to share, feel free to add them! You can also put your name down as someone who is able to share a little more about a specific resource from the list.
Galia Nevo: Technology supporting organisational culture
In this session Galia from Bizzabo walked us through how technology can be used to support different elements of organisational culture. The discussion was very lively and we covered a lot of topics relating to culture. I was doing my best to capture some of the most interesting questions we were trying to answer:
What if recruiters were more like facilitators? Talking about removing the HR interview from the process #trutelaviv
— Kasia Borowicz (@kmborowicz) 4 July 2017
Quite often the HR interview does little more than repeat the same questions the Hiring Manager will ask anyway. What if we trained the HMs to do a better job interviewing candidate without actually interviewing them ourselves? After all, a screen call provides us with the most important information about the candidate anyway…
Can you influence culture through rewarding and punishing certain behaviours? Is culture change possible at all? #trutelaviv — Kasia Borowicz (@kmborowicz) 4 July 2017
As you can imagine this really divided the group. While some believed you can shape culture, others claimed culture can’t be controlled by anyone. While it’s difficult to reach consensus when this topic comes up, I like to think we all learn and grow reflecting on it!
The one takeaway I found most useful:
Culture shouldn’t be owned by HR. It’s everyone’s responsibility so you need tools that support cooperation #trutelaviv
— Kasia Borowicz (@kmborowicz) 4 July 2017
Coming back to how technology should be used to support culture, there are obviously different of pieces of tech you can use to do so. The one aspect you should look at is how collaborative that technology is. If it’s something that can’t be easily used by everyone, if it doesn’t support transparency, perhaps you should use other tools that do.
All TRU events are different. What you can expect if you get a ticket to TRU Tel Aviv is a lot of very lively discussions, people happily sharing their minds with you (no sugar coating – Israelis can be very direct! :)) and a collaborative atmosphere nurtured by both Karen and Bill. I can definitely recommend it as one of the most interesting events in our industry!
