The annual HR Congress in Warsaw is the biggest event of it’s kind in Poland. This year’s theme was “Success and the mind”. A lot was said about how the mind works and what impact it has on being successful, about changing mental habits and automatic reactions and about coping with stress and employees’ well-being in general, so that their performance can be much higher.

In order to be successful more and more companies give their employees a lot of freedom and power. The employees organise themselves without management interference – self-appointed leaders emerge and many actions are done on-demand depending on current personnel and business needs. The leaders are very flexible, they experiment and take risks. Employees are often asked their opinion about many things in the company and decisions are made together, in teams. Quite a few sessions were devoted to the candidate and employee experience and I would like to focus a little more on them.

One of the biggest challenges faced by a modern company nowadays is how to attract candidates in times of increasing technology focus and ongoing change. It is certainly the case in the Polish IT sector, but not only. With demographic changes and a big number of IT companies, recruiters are inventing more and more creative methods to tempt candidates to apply for their jobs and not their competitor’s. They include:

1. Speed-recruiting for graduates. A 15 minutes intro screen, during which candidate’s attitudes and values are checked. After that a meeting with a manager is set up, which takes place the following day. At that meeting the manager gives the candidate a job offer.
2. Recruitment via Facebook Messenger. Once a month a recruiter is available for candidates on Facebook Messenger. First of all they can leave their cv and get immediate feedback, and they can ask the recruiter about anything related to the recruitment process or job itself.
3. Monitoring various work or IT forums and responding to candidates’ comments and questions.
4. Being present in social media. Using current events (e.g. Star Wars premiere or an international cat day) to do something interesting, post it on social media and attract candidates.
5. Making short films about the people and the atmosphere in the company – they do not need to be made professionally. It is important to show what the future colleagues are like, because while all the other things are comparable, the atmosphere and teammates can be something that distinguishes a company.
6. Creating an onboarding process that is very carefully and well drawn up, so that a candidate doesn’t have a feeling that what was talked about during the interviews doesn’t match the reality.
7. Building communities (e.g. programmers of a given language), who step out of their companies and in their free time attract candidates by sharing knowledge, helping, evaluating candidates’ skills or creating job ads specifically targeted at candidates using the same programming language.
8. Treating candidates as clients – using marketing tools and taking care of values and a homogenous image. This means also treating them seriously. 86% candidates expect to receive information about finishing the recruitment process and only 39% actually get it. Also, 81% candidates would like to know the reason of being rejected and only 18% receive such information (source: Hudson and Great Digital, Employee Experience Report 2017)
9. Exciting referral programmes – in one company 70% of employees came from the referral programme. It’s great working with friends on whom you can rely, isn’t it?

In Tivix we work hard to make candidate and employee experience very positive. We ask for immediate feedback during interviews and send a short survey after the recruitment process. But first of all, we create a safe atmosphere full of honesty, friendliness and respect. Positive opinions on various portals prove that it’s worth working for Tivix!