- AI is allowing you to generate job posting descriptions much faster and more easily. This means that it becomes easier to potentially help people create job descriptions. And then you can use it to improve the quality of how we conduct interviews.
- Microsoft has created a pre boarding extranet for interview candidates. People can use Outlook Gmail to access the site. The idea is to differentiate your organization from others. It also allows the company to potentially reboard people more effectively.
- I encourage more and more organizations to have a pre boarding space and environment. We really need to make sure managers that are hiring as well as support staff, that they understand how to use digital tools. Again, digital skills matter. Even little things like enabling recordings and transcripts or live captions.
Let's talk about recruitment and hiring, because I think this is an area where it's changing quite a bit. The first one that I'll talk about in a little bit is pre onboarding or pre boarding experiences. And so we can do things like have SharePoint sites and extranet environments for people who are just interviewing with your organization, not just those who are employed.
But before I deal with that, I wanted to talk about how AI is changing this a little bit. So if you've created a recent job posting, you've probably seen something like this on LinkedIn, where what it's doing is it's allowing you to generate those job posting descriptions much faster and more easily. Now, I'm not saying that you should use this.
Of course, like everything, you should be tweaking it and refining it. But this does mean that it becomes easier to potentially help people create job descriptions. So sometimes what I've actually seen smaller teams do is they'll use these tools, go back to that leader of a department or whoever it is, and say, hey, you've given me your job description.
I generated a generic one. I noticed that there's these skills missing from yours, or I noticed that there's these responsibilities or these keywords missing from yours. Are these relevant to you? And so even though you may not be a domain expert, all of a sudden, HR can be more supportive in improving the quality of the candidate pool as well as alignment on interviews and everything else, because you've been able to refine a job description and you don't have to do it at this level using a tool like LinkedIn.
You could just have tools like ChatGPT because it's quite safe to do this. You could say, hey, I want to create interview questions for XYZ. Or my favorite one on the right here, I know it's quite small, is let me create a dialogue, like a fake dialogue.
You are a senior resource who has these needs, et cetera, around hiring, and I am a senior hiring manager. Help me understand how I should talk to you, right? Or if I'm a recruiter, how do I talk to you, how do I work through this? And so it's a mock dialogue between two parties about pros and cons and considerations, somebody who basically has the wrong expectations. Like, it's unrealistic expectations around the potential talent pool around this thing.
So if we think that that's probably true, which it almost always is, we can use these tools to guide us, to teach us how to potentially have those dialogues with that leader who often we only have a very short amount of time. So we can kind of prethink the dialogue that we need to have. And this might guide us to have a more constructive dialogue.
Again, resetting expectations on salary or the nature of how we do the job postings, et cetera, so we have greater success. So there's lots of patterns like this where these tools can really help represent an individual or a role. And then you can use it to learn to improve the quality of how we conduct everything from interviews to job descriptions.
And then we've already talked about creating job descriptions yourselves, or even looking at the resumes that people apply in this candidate pool. What kind of job description would be if you looked at them in aggregate? What job description would that map to? And then you can actually, again, create some interesting opportunities. Where is that kind of this aggregate one very different than the job description we had? If so, is there ways that we can tune or calibrate the way in which we're getting those job candidates in the first place? So, again, there's multiple ways to look at that.
But this brings us to this either part of this dialogue. So let's say you have these interview candidates, and these aren't just like anyone who applied, right? You've selected out of maybe, like, in our case, we could get sometimes like 1000, I'm not joking, like over 1000 applicants for a role. And so we'll end up going through that and coming down to like 15 or ten maybe people that were like, okay, now these are the ones we're going to go interview in that cycle.
And then when we go to do those interviews with those ten or 15 candidates, we'll then narrow it down further right as we go through and eventually make our decision criteria. But those ten or 15 people, they're people that are influencing, right? They're people that we would have at least some interest that we think they could be a fit, if not today, in the future, in our organization. And we're already spending energy on them.
So being able to give them access to a site that takes your careers, content, all this other stuff online, and puts it together in a simple, easy to understand space becomes a really nice complement to our journey. And there's a few reasons why this is useful. The first one is these people are often interviewing at multiple companies, and so you want to differentiate your organization versus others.
And this is a really easy visual signal of differentiation from your company and others, even if they never take part in it. Getting an email saying, hey, welcome to your pre boarding extranet in your interview, if you want to learn more about our company, or you have frequently asked questions that you want to explore around interviews and what we do or your role or whatever, you can just go to the space and then come see these pages. All of a sudden, it creates this wonderful opportunity for us to learn as well, because we can look at the usage data, like which pages are more popular in this content.
Again, this is the interview candidate pool. So it's a different type of data than what we'd get on, say, our website. Our website is all these different candidate profiles as they go through and they navigate to different pages.
Here what we're getting is a sense of those who are interviewing, and we can even understand remember, they're named users, so we can even understand what role they were applying for and understand their journeys there, which is incredibly useful data to improve the way in which we not just improve this experience, but the entire pre journey to so that's one of the reasons I really like this. The other one I really like about this is we found that when you create this, first of all, it's very easy, right? We're just talking about a SharePoint extranet. We can use Outlook Gmail.
Microsoft has this capability to do business to consumer integration for authentication. So we can just allow people to use their Outlook, the same addresses that are in those resumes, right? They can use those to access this, but it also allows us to potentially reboard people a little bit more effectively as well. So one of the things that we often do is we'll say, here's the stuff we do.
And because it's not necessarily more sensitive than what we have on our website, but we don't have to worry about SEO, so we can be more comprehensive and more exploratory, et cetera. We can share more with these parties. Because, again, on our website, we have to both think about the journey, the amount of time they spend on the page, how they quickly they get to the content.
Here, there's already an intent, right, this person's interested in your company or this department, or this division or whatever. So there's a natural aptitude to invest more time learning these things. And that also means the dialogue with interviews become easier because they kind of understand the language of the organization, they understand what they're doing, how we work, et cetera.
So, again, really useful, simple investment. I encourage more and more organizations to have a pre boarding space and environment. And of course, we mentioned earlier this experience of digital fitness.
Well, using Microsoft teams, we've all been there. When you're interviewing with somebody and they don't know how to use Microsoft teams or whatever tools you're using in this process, that's a problem. And we really need to make sure managers that are hiring as well as support staff, that they understand how to use these digital tools.
Because if they get that signal right away, that might give you less confidence in the organization overall. Again, digital skills matter, and even little things like making sure you enable recordings and transcripts or live captions so that the candidate, not just you as an interviewer and the next interviewer can benefit from that, because there's a huge benefit, right? If I have the transcript and I get the next interview, then I don't need to ask those redundant questions. I can just quickly, in some cases, literally in the beginning of my interview, as we're starting doing our niceties.
I'll often check, what did they talk about, did they talk about this, did they talk about that? Right, because life is busy. That greatly improves the interview experience because that candidate is not getting the same kind of questions, repeating the same thing with this stakeholder and that stakeholder, et cetera, and then live captionings. Because so many things may not be noisy on your side as the person doing the interview, like being managing the interview, but on the other side, often they're traveling, they're working, they've been on ten interviews.
So being able to, as you speak, being able to see your subtitles and what you're saying actually becomes really helpful. Not to mention there's often a slight language bearer for a lot of people, depending on whether English is their primary language, et cetera. So again, I really encourage things like live captioning beyond intelligent recordings, all things that you can do, no almost no effort, and you standardize and just encourage, and then all of a sudden your interview process becomes better.
And of course, that example of the pre onboarding site is safe and responsible and can be done in an effective way. So this is a quick summary of some of those things that I mentioned, but there's quite a bit more that we can do in the recruit and hire space.
