Hello and welcome to the first Hiring Hub product update of 2021!
Last year was a tough one for all of us. This year has been no exception, up to now. With the days getting lighter, there’s a sense that normality is creeping ever closer. Hang on in there.
Portal
Throughout the summer last year, we were working hard on building a new product, Portal – a recruitment agency management tool. You can find out more about Portal here.
Well, we’re really happy to announce that we’ve partnered with On The Beach as a new Portal customer! There will be more to come on this, so keep your eyes peeled. After the success of filling 5 roles on the HH Marketplace before Christmas, we’ve now onboarded their PSL agencies so they can manage all of their third-party recruitment activity in one place.
Multiple positions
Back in 2020, we introduced you to the idea of being able to offer more than one candidate a position on the platform. We cleverly called this feature, multiple positions.
As a reminder, we use a kanban board to allow our employers and agencies to easily track where each candidate is in the process. It looks like this:
If all candidates submitted for the role end up on one board, and I have more than one position available for this job, now, you’re able to offer a job to as many candidates as you like! So long as this matches the number of positions you’ve specified on your role, of course.
This piece of work is really exciting and moves the entire platform forward, from a usability and technology perspective. Why are we doing this now? Because we’ve been managing this offline for a while and we wanted to streamline the experience for our customers and reduce admin overhead in our operations team.
The tech team has been working on rewriting the very structure of a job, from a one-to-one relationship of job-position, to one where a single job can exist with multiple available positions.
This means, the user experience doesn’t really change. Our agencies will still only see one job card and kanban board . Our employers will only see one job card and one kanban board, but can make more than one offer on the candidates submitted to their job.
Aside from some small front end changes, such as displaying and editing the number of available positions, other aspects of the job flow have had to be modified. The most significant of which is reviews. We always encourage our employers to leave a review for the successful agency who filled their role, so other employers using the platform can understand the quality of our agencies from the experience of others. Under the new job structure, we needed to find a more efficient way of collecting reviews that didn’t dominate the employer user experience. Now, we’ve consolidated all outstanding reviews into a single page in the app, so employers can easily see and action all reviews in one place.
We’ve been incrementally adding the code into live and regression testing it along the way. Now, we’re completing some final development touches and we can start testing the full feature with real data. It touches quite a few areas of our code base so there’s extra use cases to cover, to make sure it’s bang on.
We’re really excited for you to see this!
Candidate Diversity
We want to help employers measure diversity metrics through their third-party recruitment process, via anonymised data, so they can understand if they have any bias through their process or even if some of their suppliers are fishing in a more diverse candidate pool.
Hiring Hub relies on agencies to upload candidate information to the platform, which is then submitted to employers as an application. The aim of this feature is to collect the most accurate data for employers about their candidates, and for agencies to learn more about the mix of candidates they’re recruiting and the processes they use to do so.
In order to ensure the data is as truthful and accurate as possible, we need the candidate to provide their diversity data. Not only does it eliminate inaccurate data being collected by agencies, but this information is very personal, and it’s possible not everyone would feel comfortable sharing that with a recruitment agency. Collecting the data this way means we can ensure anonymity from the outset.
To do this, we’re researching how employers gather diversity information from their staff and interested candidates, and what data they’re collecting. Once we’ve got a firm understanding of what companies are collecting and why, we’ll begin working on a solution to collect diversity data outside of the HH platform that can be customised to each individual company.
If you have any experience in gathering diversity information from candidates or your internal staff, we’d love to hear from you.
What is Hiring Hub?
