It’s All Connected: Better Technology, Better Relationships, Better Work

“Our strategy is to bring our job seekers closer to the hire. And our vision is that, one day, our job seekers will receive a job with the click of a button.” That vision is built on reliable partnerships that look to the future, cutting-edge technology that boosts engagement and a transparent recruitment process that builds trust and elevates applicants of all backgrounds.

At FutureWorks 2022, Farris sat down with three industry experts and Indeed clients: Infosys SVP and Head of Talent Acquisition Rajesh Ahuja, DISH Network EVP and Chief Human Resource Officer David Scott and Salesforce VP of Global Brand Marketing Molly Ford. Together, they talked about their companies’ most complex recruitment challenges and how technology is helping to solve them.

Farris told the audience he is most excited about improving the hiring process in three areas: content, engagement and quality. Here’s what he and his panelists had to say.

Better Content Means Better Hires

“We’ve heard loudly from our job seekers that they want to see salaries in job postings,” Farris said. Job seekers are 75% more likely to apply for a position that has pay listed in the description, according to Indeed data. This is arguably the most important piece of content that businesses can include in their postings. Indeed research also shows that job seekers are 75% more likely to apply for a job if a company has a reputation for paying fairly.

Companies can establish pay equity by collecting accurate and comprehensive internal data to inform future recruitment. Ford told the crowd that Salesforce has been committed to pay equity since 2015. “We did an audit and found a gap,” she said. “We had a system of records to know our pay gap, and it’s our responsibility to close it [as we continue to hire new people].”

“We all know the time has come,” Ahuja said. “Employment is based on trust, and transparency is a key pillar of trust.” But he was not naive to the sensitivities of talking openly about pay. “You have internal challenges and legal challenges, [but] it’s better that organizations lead it from the front.”

“As a Colorado-based employer, our time has already come,” DISH Network’s Scott said. The Colorado legislature passed the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2021, and requires employers to provide salary ranges and benefits information in all of their job listings. Cities and states around the country are following suit. Most recently, on Nov. 1, 2022, New York City mandated that employers post “a good faith salary range for every job, promotion and transfer opportunity advertised.”

Boosted Engagement Speeds Hiring

“We have been hard at work creating opportunities for job seekers to engage with employers on our platform,” Farris said. “When you think about speed-to-hire in this industry, it is a metric that needs to be improved: Finding work for job seekers faster is an incredible responsibility.”

As the pandemic-era labor market continues to shift and the characteristics that determine the “right” candidate also keep changing, Infosys has needed a more technologically bespoke approach to finding the highest quality applicants, Ahuja said. “In hiring, there are unique problems that require unique solutions,” he said. When Infosys found its customer service chatbot to be leaps and bounds more advanced than its ‘“pretty primitive Q&A” recruiting chatbot, the company migrated the technology to provide better engagement for prospective employees.

“Our goal is to hire, hire, hire,” Ford said, adding that she has seen a shift in the hiring process at Salesforce, where candidates aren’t just hoping to be chosen but asking themselves, Do I want to work here? 

“I’m just proud to see people showing you what matters to them,” she said. “The pandemic job seeker is not looking for just a job — they want a company that’s a destination, that aligns to their core values, where they can feel like they can do meaningful work.” To Ford, understanding what makes a candidate want to work at Salesforce is a core tenet of her values-driven approach to hiring, which in turn increases engagement — allowing her to hire, hire, hire.

Sometimes it’s the smallest change that drives engagement: “We had an in-home service technician job posting that, with two words changed in the description that Indeed [and its data] highlighted to us, drove up our applicant flow tremendously,” Scott said. It made finding a successful candidate a lot faster.

Data Delivers High-Quality Applicants 

As Indeed continues to improve its matching technology and screening questions, Farris explained, the company has come to understand “the ways we can deliver a highly qualified candidate to your inbox.” Across major markets in 2023, the company plans to migrate the pay-per-click (PPC) model to a pay-per-started-application (PPSA) and a  pay-per-application (PPA) model. This year, to test these new models, Indeed has encouraged deal breaker questions and enabled current customers to reject an unqualified applicant within 72 hours and request a replacement.

Data and technology can also be used to widen the door for applicants from marginalized communities. Ford noted that inclusive hiring has been a key shift for Salesforce in recent years. “We are looking at Indeed’s data that says what women are looking for in a job [description]. What are some keywords we might be missing, or what about our job descriptions is not appealing to women? And really looking for the data to say which buzzwords we should have in our job descriptions.” A couple of those buzzwords are “flexibility” and “hybrid work.”

Indeed is a reliable partner that uses technology to create better content in job postings and a hiring process that leads to thoughtful engagement and the right hire. “Ultimately, as a pay-for-performance organization,” Farris said, “we have to show up every day and ensure that the experience and results are there.”