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Kevin W. Grossman

Kevin W. Grossman is the Talent Board president and board member responsible for all aspects of the Candidate Experience Awards worldwide, the first nonprofit research organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience. He’s also the chief evangelist at TalentCulture, a leading media outlet for content about HR technology, talent acquisition and HR’s role in the future of work. He co-hosts the #WorkTrends podcast with TalentCulture CEO, Meghan M. Biro, where he’s collaborated with Meghan since 2010. He also produces and hosts the Talent Board podcast The CandEs Shop Talk. A certified Talent Acquisition Strategist (TAS) and Human Capital Strategist (HCS) by HCI, Kevin has 20 years of domain expertise in the human resource and talent acquisition industry and related technology marketplace. He’s been a prolific "HR business" blogger and writer since 2004 and his first business book on career management titled Tech Job Hunt Handbook was released in December 2012 from Apress. Kevin holds a B.A. in Psychology from San Jose State University. Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevinWGrossman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwgrossman/
Picture of Kevin W. Grossman

Kevin W. Grossman

Kevin W. Grossman is the Talent Board president and board member responsible for all aspects of the Candidate Experience Awards worldwide, the first nonprofit research organization focused on the elevation and promotion of a quality candidate experience. He’s also the chief evangelist at TalentCulture, a leading media outlet for content about HR technology, talent acquisition and HR’s role in the future of work. He co-hosts the #WorkTrends podcast with TalentCulture CEO, Meghan M. Biro, where he’s collaborated with Meghan since 2010. He also produces and hosts the Talent Board podcast The CandEs Shop Talk. A certified Talent Acquisition Strategist (TAS) and Human Capital Strategist (HCS) by HCI, Kevin has 20 years of domain expertise in the human resource and talent acquisition industry and related technology marketplace. He’s been a prolific "HR business" blogger and writer since 2004 and his first business book on career management titled Tech Job Hunt Handbook was released in December 2012 from Apress. Kevin holds a B.A. in Psychology from San Jose State University. Twitter: https://twitter.com/KevinWGrossman LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwgrossman/

12 Tips for Purchasing HR Tech Wisely, Part 2

My previous post was devoted to the first six of my 12 HR tech-buying guidelines. In this post I share the remaining six … but not before I take a moment to marvel at the juggernaut the HR tech marketplace has become. First of all, it’s ginormous: Bersin by Deloitte has estimated the HR technology marketplace to be $400 billion. The worldwide investment in developing new HR tech exceeded $1 billion in the first half of 2018 and could exceed $2 billion in 2019. Our marketplace is also highly complex: Applicant tracking systems alone number in the hundreds, to say nothing

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12 Tips for Purchasing HR Tech Wisely, Part 1

Company size and industry are the two biggest influences on the technology that HR buyers select for their companies, when they buy it, how they buy it and how often they replace it. What’s different from company to company is the complexity of the workforce and the industry layers on the other side of that. Buying HR tech for a company with 50 hourly workers, for example, is a very different proposition from buying HR tech for a company with 50 contingent workers or 50 product managers. And the type and number of technologies your organization needs will evolve as your

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balloons at sunset

Buying New HR Tech? Make Candidate and Employee Experiences a Top Priority

As I noted in my previous post, 2019 is going to be an amazing and challenging year for HR tech buyers, thanks to the growing wealth of platforms, solutions and services we have to understand and choose from. Understanding our options is a big part of our challenge — but it’s only one part. We also need to make our buying decisions based on the effect they’ll have on other parts of the organization and on the business itself. We’ve spent the past decade or more transforming the HR function and our businesses. Naturally we need to empower these ongoing transformations

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Talent Board Candidate Experience Research

The 2017 Talent Board Candidate Experience Research: 4 Takeaways

How’s your candidate experience looking? And just as importantly, how does it stack up to your competition? In this year’s Talent Board candidate experience 2017 research, we heard from 220,000 job seekers from around the world who applied for jobs at more than 300 employers. Through these candidate surveys, we built a picture of the current state of candidate experience, as well as the tools, processes and technologies employers use to shape that experience. So what’s the big picture result? We took one step forward. And…one step back. What’s Improving Here’s the good news for people obsessed with candidate experience (like

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Why You Should Adopt the Golden Rule of Talent Acquisition and Candidate Experience

Why You Should Adopt the Golden Rule of Talent Acquisition and Candidate Experience

“Approach talent acquisition as you do every important relationship—with compassion, transparency and open communication—and treat candidates the way you’d want your mother treated if she were interviewing.” That’s West Monroe Partners’ Golden Rule of talent acquisition, which Adela Schoolderman shared with attendees of a recent Talent Board webinar. Schoolderman is Talent Acquisition Manager and Diversity & Inclusion Leader at West Monroe Partners, a Chicago-based consultancy and a first-time CandE Award winner in 2016. For Schoolderman and her firm, its Golden Rule isn’t just a slogan. They live it every day. “Your candidate experience is your talent brand,” she explained. “You can

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How to Transform Recruiters Into Trusted Advisors

How to Transform Recruiters Into Trusted Advisors

What are the symptoms of an ailing candidate experience? For New York-Presbyterian Hospital, the first major symptom was a rising candidate dropout rate in its online application process. When roughly 60% of candidates dropped out of the process when asked to complete an online assessment, David Crawford, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, knew it was time to do some exploratory surgery—an experience he shared in another recent Talent Board webinar. Crawford and his team examined the process from every angle, extracting data from candidate surveys and their applicant tracking system. They also reviewed the organization’s overall application process and took a

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How Measuring Your Candidate Experience Can Pay Off

How Measuring Your Candidate Experience Can Pay Off

Exactly what is the business impact of a poor candidate experience? According to the latest global Talent Board research, 41% of your candidates will take their allegiance, product purchases and brand relationships elsewhere because of it. They won’t apply again, they won’t refer others and they won’t buy your stuff. That could equate to millions of dollars in revenue for consumer-based businesses (like Virgin Media’s business impact work and the dozens of companies that have won our Candidate Experience Awards based on having the highest candidate ratings in our survey research) and potential eventual lost revenue due to not having the

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Recruiting Efficiency

Recruiting Efficiency Can and Does Improve Candidate Experience

Recruiting is made up of a million different moving pieces. Literally. And they’re not linear either; they constantly loop back and in on themselves. Some of them help with talent attraction. Some do the heavy lifting of recruitment itself. And others help us with the final stages of the hiring process. These pieces don’t have to operate in perfect harmony because that just doesn’t exist. But to strive for peak efficiency is key, even if it means only focusing on two to three areas your team can improve today. This kind of harmonic efficiency is only possible when the right technology,

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The Business Impact of Candidate Experience

Here’s what crystal clear in business today: poor customer service impacts customer retention, referrals and potential new business. Social media has given consumers an open forum to share both good and bad product and service experiences to all who will listen. How many of you have used social media to get some customer service action instead of growing old waiting on the customer service phone trees or trying to navigate the labyrinth of online FAQ databases? The same has been true for job seekers, and for too long employers were resistant to treating candidate as the primary customer of recruiting. Per

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When Recruiting Improves Candidate Communication

“Do you hear the phone when I call? Do you feel the thud when I fall? Do you hear the crack when I break? Did you lock the door when it shut? Did you see the knife when it cut? Do you keep your ear to the ground? For the kid in Lonely Town…” —Brandon Flowers, Lonely Town Work. There comes a time when we reflect on whether or not to defect. Of whether we stay the course of a complicated, even painful relationship that does not reinvest to retain, or if we close our eyes and leap. We see these reflections

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#TChat Preview: How to Manage Through Influence

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, February 3, 2016, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). Last week we talked about how HR leaders achieve talent brand dominance; this week we’re going to talk about how to manage through influence. Organizations are becoming more matrixed and less hierarchical every day. Command-and-control corporate structures are relics of the past. Dealing with flatter organizational structures, outsourcing, and virtual teams can all be quite challenging. Because of this, more and more managers need to get things done through their peers inside and outside their organizations. However, because the world of work

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#TChat Preview: How HR Leaders Achieve Talent Brand Dominance

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, January 27, 2016, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). Last week we talked about how tech pros can help assess and hire tech pros, and this week we’re going to talk about how HR leaders achieve talent brand dominance. Employers are constantly aware of the state of their company brand. But very few organizations realize the impact of their talent brand on both their reputation to job seekers and company morale amongst existing employees. A talent brand is what talent (which comprises both working and non-working professionals think, feel, and share

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TalentCulture's #TChat: The Evolution Of A Successful Chat

TalentCulture and #TChat. The evolution of a successful Twitter chat… Meghan M. Biro and I have done something amazing here, something we are so very proud of. We started over five years ago in November of 2010. With only Meghan’s TalentCulture site and its early followers and readers, a handful of early-adopter Twitter friends and followers, and a hashtag by the name of #TChat — the TalentCulture Twitter Chat was born. We never thought it would last a month. But it did. Then, two years later we launched the #TChat Radio Show, and eventually merged the two together to form the

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#TChat Preview: How Tech Pros Can Help Assess and Hire Tech Pros

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, January 20, 2016, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). Last week we talked about why the best recruitment means smarter workforce marketing, and this week we’re going to talk about how tech pros can help assess and hire tech pros. In the world of recruiting, experts are a little more difficult to define. The exception to this rule is in the field of technology. The tech field is based on those who have real-world, developed, sought-after skills. True technical expertise is difficult to find, even as it is increasingly needed in

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#TChat Preview: How to Create the Ultimate Hiring Experience

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live in the New Year on Wednesday, January 6, 2015, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). In the last show of 2015, we talked about the power of relationships, and this week we’re going to talk about how to create the ultimate hiring experience. While still figuring out what he wanted to do with his life, writer and film-maker Heath Padgett quit his software sales job and convinced his new bride to hit the road on their honeymoon in 2014 and work a different job in all 50 U.S. states. They called their quest

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This Sink Or Swim Social Recruiting Reality Check

What a difference six years makes. Or doesn’t make. At least when we’re swimming in the parallel pools of social marketing and social recruiting. When you dive into those social pools with me, you’ll find that way back in the latter half of 2009 there were about six million monthly Twitter users. Back then I worked for HRmarketer and wrote one of the first social media marketing guides for the HR and recruiting technology marketplace titled Conversation Starters: Social Media Marketing in the HR Marketplace. You can actually still download it. Right on. It was a pretty comprehensive undertaking back in

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#TChat Preview: Looking Back on Some Favorite Chats

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, December 9, 2015, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). Last week we talked about how social recruiting makes the talent business case, and this week we’re going to share a few of our favorite #TChat shows from 2015! No, we’re not doing a production of Sound of Music — but since it’s nearing the end of the year and the holidays are upon us, the TalentCulture #TChat Show co-hosts and co-founders Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman, along with their amazing #TChat event manager and show producer Cyndy Trivella, wanted

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Make Your Own Blended Worlds of Work

The three of us have lived and breathed on all three worlds. We’ve been full-time employees, we’ve been independent contractors, and we’ve been entrepreneurs – all in varying capacities and with varying success. And sometimes we’ve been on two or even all three at once. Because of this, we of course agreed that the way we used to work is long gone. We being myself, TalentCulture #TChat Show co-founder and co-host Meghan M. Biro, and founder and CEO of Zenith Talent Sunil Bagai, a recent show guest. We discussed how the days of primarily being full-time or part-time have given way

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#TChat Preview: How Wellness Programs Improve Employee Performance

The TalentCulture #TChat Show is back live on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, from 1-2 pm ET (10-11 am PT). Last week we talked about the blended workforce and its benefits and challenges. This week we’ll be talking about wellness programs; how they improve employee performance and the importance of leadership buy-in for employee participation. According to the American Heart Association, sedentary jobs have increased 83% since 1950, and physically active jobs now make up less than 20% of our workforce. By comparison, in 1960, about half of the US workforce was physically active. Being physically active improves employees’ health, which is

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Recruit and Hire with the Real Atmospherians

“Some world views are spacious, and some are merely spaced.” —Rush, Grand Designs   Scene 1: Pacific Avenue was closed for Halloween. Throngs of families dressed up for the holiday, passed one another while children chased each other in circles, their bags of candy swinging round and round. As we trick-or-treated from merchant to merchant, homeless panhandlers hit us up for money, while some staggered among us like the living dead. Scene 2: The banner hung askew along the chain-link fence. It read “The Home Depot Is Hiring – Inquire Within.” As we drove into The Home Depot parking lot, day laborers

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#TChat Preview: The Blended Workforce – Benefits and Staffing Challenges

Last week we talked about how to make meetings worth everyone’s time. This week we’re going to address the benefits of a blended workforce and the staffing challenges it brings. The way we used to work is gone. The days of full-time or part-time employees have given way to the blended workforce — a mix of individuals working as independent contractors, freelance workers and self-employed entrepreneurial talent alongside full-time colleagues. Employers are now hiring record numbers of contingent workers and relying on a mix of employees to achieve organizational goals. Not only that, research shows that these workers are happier, have achieved greater work-life integration and are profiting on

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#TChat Preview: How to Make Meetings Worth Everyone’s Time

Last week the TalentCulture team talked about how hiring managers can reduce the cost of hiring and this week we’re discussing how to make meetings worth everyone’s time with Dick and Emily Axelrod, founders of The Axelrod Group, Inc., a consulting firm that pioneered the use of employee involvement to effect large-scale organizational change. Too many of us feel that meetings are time-wasting, energy-sapping affairs. Most meetings feel like useless gatherings endured at the expense of the real work that needs to get done. But meetings can be productive! Tune in to learn how! Sneak Peek: #TChat Events: How to Make Meetings Worth

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Selling the Recruiting Process Isn’t a Gamble

“Wheel goes round, landing on a twist of faith Taking your chances you’ll have the right answers When the final judgment begins Wheel goes round, landing on a leap of fate Life redirected in ways unexpected Sometimes the odd number wins The way the big wheel spins…” —Rush, The Big Wheel   Step right up and spin the HR technology Conference career wheel – a winner every time! Well, not quite, but the nostalgia of the all my previous HR Technology & Exposition conferences overcame me at the latest one when I realized that all my best and worst career incarnations

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#TChat Preview: How Hiring Managers Can Reduce The Cost of Hiring

  Last week the TalentCulture team talked about why recruitment should be transparent marketing, and this week we’re going to talk about how hiring managers can reduce the cost of hiring with Nikos Moraitakis, CEO of Workable, a technology startup reinventing hiring for ambitious companies. A high percentage of mature talent acquisition functions report that they have high-performing relationships with hiring managers. Nurturing these relationships increase a company’s ability to hire qualified individuals efficiently and cost-effectively and meet today’s business needs and tomorrow’s challenges will excel and save potentially millions per year. Sneak Peek: #TChat Events: How Hiring Managers Can Reduce The Cost of

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