With candidates gaining the upper hand, how can talent acquisition leaders and their companies respond? What innovative techniques can give an employer a competitive advantage? The answers lie in what workers say is most important in choosing employers right now: better compensation, to be sure, but also personalized benefits, an inclusive environment, and a sense of social purpose. Plus: How can technology help recruiters find non-traditional candidates with potential? From Day One gathered experts for a virtual conference in January. Among the highlights:

What Makes a Company Attractive to Early-Career Talent 

Ever since she was a student, Giselle Battley, the global head of early-career talent at the commercial real-estate firm JLL, has been observing the ebbs and flows in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruiting. “As an HBCU student, I saw when we were hot and we were not. The truth is, if you’re going to go out to new sources, it’s a long-term game, it’s not a short thing. You can do more damage by showing up, and never showing up again once you hit your numbers,” she said in a panel discussion on attracting early-career talent, moderated by Shana Lebowitz-Gaynor, a correspondent for Insider who covers career development and workplace culture.

As Gen Z has now entered the workforce, and will constitute up to 27% of the workforce by 2025, companies find themselves having to adapt their culture and their pitch to attract new generations. DEI appears to have solidified into an integral value for companies eager to attract early-career talent. “They want their workplace to be inclusion forward,” said Alesandra McLean, head of North American campus and early-career programs at Wayfair. “They want a lot of autonomy, they want to have the possibility to make an impact.”

And while the demands of early-career workers have not changed that dramatically in recent years, the attitudes did. “What changed is that you always have to stay on top,” said Battley. “Gen Z is making their demands—and DEI is at the top—and corporations have to meet those.” And these demands are more about attitudes than about specific benefits or management practices.

“I don't think we’ve seen change: the real (development) is the agility and flexibility by individuals, but not from jobs as a whole,” said Crystal Lannaman, head of talent acquisition and  university relations for the chemicals company BASF. “We created a grid to help decision-makers decide what can be in-person and what can be remote,” she said. “Being able to showcase it eliminates the risk of dividing things between haves and have nots. With the pandemic, people are really starting to assess where they want to be and why, for the greater good.”

In addition, more companies have started offering rotational programs, both for college students and for early-career workers. BASF has a talent marketplace where, for example, a chemical engineer who wants to move into business management can take advantage of the program that allows them to test the waters in a real work environment. And while there’s a modicum of accountability, it’s less anxiety-producing than jumping into a completely new role you haven’t done before. “You have to continuously create a new and exciting experience,” said Battley. “It's incumbent on the employer to provide the experience of growth. It's an undervalued or overlooked insight.”

A candidate can possess as many notions and skills as they can muster, but often they’re unprepared for the way the interview process unfolds. Wayfair instituted workshops on interview preparedness. “We took a deep look at their recruiting funnel, where we see a big drop-off in the process. Where in our process were people slipping up?” said McLean. “The data was really what led us: we now see a lot of success in students that go through that.”

McLean sees skill-building initiatives offered by companies as more relevant than standard on-campus career fairs. Building these skills can curb early-career attrition. “Sixty percent of students said they won’t be at a job for an extended period of time, and 66% said they applied to a role mainly to improve their chances of employment,” said Tom Brunskill, the CEO and co-founder of the learning platform Forage, who observed that the company’s partner employers face a 50% to 70% attrition rate. “Retention has always been a challenge, but why is it difficult?” he pondered. “Fundamentally it comes back to this idea that our education sector is great, but does not set people up for success in terms of career. [Industries can] provide the confidence, sensibility, and so on, to bridge that gap.”

In all, employers have to do their part in being upfront with talent. In fact, the data surveyed at SkillSurvey, a talent-intelligence platform, indicated that if a student does not know where they fit in a company from a skill standpoint, it’s going to be a challenge for them to find a real match in that company. There are, for instance, eight competencies that are the most sought after by employers, said Jake Burke, SkillSurvey’s VP of sales.

“Students and early talent don't know where they stand because they’ve never been measured on these important things,” said Burke. “The No. 1 required, or preferred, competency is critical thinking. What students are really good at is equity and inclusion, but critical thinking is No. 1. Equity and inclusion is No. 8. So, what companies want is the inverse of where students are. There are these gaps between what students are bringing, or what early career talent and applicants are bringing to the table, and what employers are valuing.”

If expectations are clearly set, that’s half of the battle. “Gen Z is very pragmatic, technically nimble and entrepreneurial,” Burke continued. “We have to make sure employers’ expectations match with what was posted in the job post. If you do that well, the retention goes up, disappointment goes down.”—By Angelica Frey 

How to Expand Your Business Globally, Ethically, and Equitably (Sponsor Spotlight)

Expanding digitization of work means companies can access talent anywhere. What often stands in the way are the logistics of global expansion. For every new state, for every new country where a company wants to hire, it has to establish a presence there—legal, tax, HR, operations. So even if a company in Baltimore finds a great engineer in Bucharest, that’s not a hire they can easily make.

During From Day One’s conference, I had a one-on-one conversation with Nicole Sahin, CEO and founder of Globalization Partners, which helps companies solve this problem and expand into new states and new countries without setting up their own infrastructure in those jurisdictions. Globalization Partners acts as an employer of record, and growing businesses can hire talent through their platform.

My conversation with Sahin, titled “The Democratization of Opportunity: Bringing the Dreams to the Dreamers,” addressed the effects of expansion and the obligations of companies that do so. “I always found it sad that people had to go to these really expensive communities far away from home,” said Sahin. “Now people can stay in their home community. It’s better for families, it’s better for communities, and it spreads opportunity to everyone everywhere, which is just unbelievably compelling when you think about that on a global scale.”

Don’t confuse what Sahin does with offshoring. The goal is not work at a discount, but responsible and ethical employment. “Our business model is not driven by the company’s desire for low-cost talent. It’s driven by the desire for companies to be able to access the best talent they can find, anywhere they can find it, and the elimination of geography as a core feature of that.”

Sahin has a unique perspective on what it means to help a wide range of companies hire and retain workers around the world. What it takes varies by country, but what is universal, she said, is the desire to work for a company with an inspiring mission. To that end, people are looking at sites like Glassdoor to get a sense of whether the company walks the talk.

With this in mind, expansion can be a means of supporting the local community as much as the business doing the hiring. Communities get access to more jobs, workers get access to better pay. “It’s part of our job to make sure that those employee rights are respected,” she said.

Sahin believes the person living in Montana should have the same job opportunities as the one living in Silicon Valley. And with the workforce largely in control of the job market, they’re demanding those opportunities. “Those employees are now saying, ‘I want a global salary. I’m worth as much as your employees in California, and I want to be paid accordingly.’ And if their current employer won’t give them that type of pay increase, they'll switch jobs.”

One of her goals is, indeed, to foster pay equity. “The idea is that we would build a global platform that enables companies to hire talent anywhere in the world quickly and easily, while still honoring, importantly, the employment laws in that location and making sure that people get paid the way the law is designed to protect those employees.”

Sahin is sympathetic to business leaders who are apprehensive about going global. “We always want people to carry forward our own mission. We want to make sure we hire the right person for the job and that they love and care for our own business the same way we do.”

For those on the fence, her advice is to take the leap. “It’s not easy to navigate, but it’s totally possible to navigate. And the benefits are so tremendous, of working with a truly diverse workforce that inherently comes along with building a more global team.”—By Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza

Building an Inclusive Culture That Keeps People on Board–and Attracts Their Peers 

Today’s workforce is characterized by record departures, a demand for flexible work policies, and an understanding that inclusive company cultures are a priority, driving organizations to build effective strategies that address these needs to keep employees and attract new talent.

Judith Harrison is the EVP of global DEI at Weber Shandwick, a leading communications firm. In a fireside chat moderated by Sam Blum, a reporter at HR Brew, Harrison shared how her company evolved its internal strategies in response to the changing times. According to Harrison, building policies that encourage employees to stay with the company should be thought of not just from a policy perspective, but from a strategic one, too. “In the past, we had the luxury of having a little more focus on getting work done,” she said. “We worked hard to get a great culture, but we had a tremendous focus on work and not enough on work-life balance, which is huge now. We want to make sure we are giving people the support they need.”

Weber Shandwick, which operated with a 100% remote workforce during the pandemic, is moving toward a hybrid model, the goal being “work-life balance and flexibility.” Harrison acknowledged some key differences, however, when it comes to a significant demographic of the workforce: Gen Z and Millennials. “There is a sense of social responsibility and idealism that was not seen in previous generations as it relates to work,” she said. “In the past, there was no expectation that an organization would share employees’ social values or that it would stand for a particular mission or objective, but these things have changed, and Weber is looking to change with them.”

In addition, many employees desire more opportunities to stay connected with one another. “People are being hired through Zoom and managing teams they’ve never met face to face. We’ve lost something in the way we connect,” she said.  “What people are asking us for is to be proactive in ways to connect with one another. They want a sense of culture and community more than ever. They want more of an ability to build and steer their career–they want more agency.”

This led the company to move away from a dated evaluation model and begin talking about processes that cultivated careers more organically. The firm developed a “Talent Compass” to facilitate and foster customized career building, and created Juice, a program intended to address work-life balance through discounts on, and access to, premium services related to health, nutrition, fitness, and mindfulness, enabling employees to participate in multiple activities to help bring them back to a balanced sense of self for work.

The firm found that employees were initially reluctant to separate themselves from work due to uncertainty around job security that the pandemic introduced, on top of balancing external situations regarding children, family, and housing. But it didn’t mean they weren’t experiencing growing levels of overwork as a result of the evaporated lines dividing work life and personal life. Harrison highlighted how leadership made it clear that it was okay to “not be okay,” citing herself as an example. “There have been times with all of the things going on the news and social unrest that I have been exhausted,” she said. “We really want to be sure that they understand that it’s okay to not be okay.”

When it comes to her own career, Judith shared how she got her start working in public relations. Throughout her experience in the space, she recognized glaring issues surrounding DEI that existed across the industry, not just at one company. People were not conscious about issues regarding diversity, she said, pointing to an example of a company she worked at where the HR manager decorated her office with a large Confederate flag.

After some time, she observed that things were getting better, but that co-workers were not actively working on specific areas to improve diversity. This realization inspired her to begin steering her career toward a role that equipped her to take action as it related to advancing DEI in the workplace.

The last two years, marked by significant political and civil unrest, have shed light on inequality and racism in the workplace, as well. In response, many corporations publicly pledged to enact policies to support diversity and inclusion. But when it comes to efficacy of newfound policies, Harrison asserted that companies could do better, mentioning how many organizations talk about the necessity of DEI, but fall flat when it came to taking action.

“At Weber Shandwick, we’re working to bake that into everything we do,” she said. “DEI is not HR’s job. It’s not the leadership’s job. It is everybody’s job. We want to inculcate that as part of the culture. We want to make sure that people feel supported and heard, especially people from marginalized backgrounds, who are maybe having an even more difficult time feeling seen and heard in an environment where you’'re not even seeing people in person.”

She shared the steps that her company has taken in the past couple of years aiming to further progress in DEI. The breadth of conversation and action around social issues like racism and mental health has expanded tremendously, with the company hosting regular conversations where employees are free to openly share their thoughts and personal experiences.

The organization also launched four business resource groups (BRGs),  the name being a distinction from employee resource groups (ERGs), she said, to indicate that the groups are aligned with business objectives. In addition, DEI education was introduced to employees, with biweekly classes dedicated to exploring and understanding the Black experience in America. “This is what helps people feel super connected to one another,” she said. “It creates this level of trust that I don’t think I’ve ever seen.”—By Tania Rahman