Operations and HR folks have a passion for organization. Everything has its place and clutter can make us go nuts! The Kin team understands that, and we’ve made some great updates to streamline your operations even more: Custom calendar filters and some big improvements to new hire task management.
Custom Calendar Filters
You can now filter your Kin calendar based on an event category (time off, company holidays, etc.), locations, and work groups created in your account. For all of you managers out there, you can also filter the calendar to view only those events for the people you manage along with pending time off requests.
If you subscribe to your Kin calendar with Google or your other calendar apps, your Kin calendar subscription URL will automatically regenerate based on how you filter your calendar in Kin. Pretty sweet, huh?
Onboarding Tasks: Categories and Due Dates
The onboarding feature in Kin helps streamline and organize the tasks, files, and communications you share with a new hire. We’ve made some updates to make the onboarding tasks even more effective with task categories and due dates.
Task categories are a great way to group new hire onboarding tasks. For example, you may wish to differentiate different tasks based on roles, teams or even location. Task categories make it easy to include only those tasks that apply to a specific hire.
We also added due dates for onboarding tasks. Due dates can be set to be X number of days, weeks, or months before or after a new hire’s start date. This is a great way to stagger out and prioritize tasks before the new hire’s start date, and throughout their first few weeks or months.
Once you’ve updated your current onboarding task template with categories and due dates, you can see how they come into play via an employee’s onboarding setup page. Under the tasks section of the page, you’ll be able to quickly select a category and its tasks and see the actual due date for the task based on the new hire’s start date.
That’s it for Now
If you have any questions or feedback on these updates, please reach out to us at theteam@10.20.21.87. Also, keep your eyes peeled for another new feature we’ll be releasing in the next few weeks, in-app reporting for time off! Who’s pumped?
By Alex Yohn
Jun 6, 2016
Welcome to the contemporary workplace, which oftentimes isn’t even a physical place. We can work anywhere, anytime, and even sometimes without pants on. Over the course of three decades, the workplace has evolved rapidly, from a time when your physical location was the sole indicator of whether you were at work, to our current reality of 24/7 connectivity driven by a work-from-anywhere mentality.
Historical census data reveals that Americans aren’t necessarily working more hours per week (in fact, there is strong evidence revealing a decline in working hours), however the nature of our work has changed dramatically – more and more people are working anytime, anywhere. In 2003, 19% of people worked from home. By 2014, that percentage jumped to 23%.
We largely have technology to thank for the efficiencies and seamless, instantaneous communication that have contributed to a decline in working hours. These days we interview and hire people from anywhere in the world without ever meeting them in person. We collaborate asynchronously online to maximize productivity regardless of timezone. It’s never been easier to manage employee operations, as so much routine administrative work can now be automated or outsourced.
However, the notion that every technological innovation is a godsend for the workplace is misleading. We’re more isolated than ever as individuals dialing-in to remote workplaces, which decreases the serendipity found in physical workplaces that’s so crucial to creative collaboration. Our collective physical health suffers as well because our jobs demand us to stare into screens for hours on end, leading to higher healthcare costs. Today’s employers are faced with the question: How much technology is enough? It’s a hard question to answer. Technology has fully blurred the lines between work and home, requiring both employers and employees to completely redefine workplace culture and policy. The fast-paced, competitive nature of our industry means every company needs to stay just as relevant as a workplace as they do with their products/services.
In our upcoming series, we will be uncovering the nature of the beast that is the contemporary workplace – shaped by technology and a generation of rather determined Millennials. We’ll highlight the deepest challenges and share key insights from long-tenured, independent companies which have experienced the ebb and flow of workplace trends over the years. From required time off and wellness programs, to best remote-working practices, to ideal organizational structures, to the rise of the almighty perk, we’ve got a great series lined up. Stay tuned.
About the authors: Craig Bryant is Founder and CEO of Kin. Emily Powers is Director of Operations and Finance at Fresh Tilled Soil.
An interview with the team at Tack Mobileby Lindsay Sanders
Located in the industrial, urban space of the TAXI community in Denver’s RiNo Art District, Tack Mobile designs and builds software for mobile and connected devices. With an impressive portfolio of clients and employees, Tack offers a work culture that is open and intellectually stimulating. Read on to learn more about the team and how they’ve used Kin to improve their employee reviews.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[JM] My name is John Myers, and I’m the President of Tack Mobile. My favorite food is Mochi, with or without ice cream in the middle.
What’s the story of Tack Mobile?
[JM] Tack Mobile was founded at the end of 2011 in Denver. We’re a client services company focused on software development for mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, and other connected devices). We place an emphasis on user experience design, and ensuring the server-side services behind the scenes that make the magic happen are well integrated as part of the larger solution. Most of our 20-something staff is here in our main office in Denver. We have one developer who spends part of the year in Dublin.
Tack Mobile also owns a coworking space in Denver called Assembly, and we enjoy meeting new like-minded folks there. It’s a good way to stay engaged in the community and another excuse to host happy hours and bake-offs.
What’s great about working at Tack?
[JM] I believe the greatest thing about working for any company should be your coworkers, so many of the decisions we make are around team happiness and recruiting.
During our new office build out last year, we attempted our own take on something of a mash up of the Dropbox office and Facebook’s Menlo Park offices. Our space is much smaller than either of those, but we ended up with something better than we could have reasonably expected and we were excited to have it featured recently in Offscreen magazine. No one has a private office here, we have lots of plants and natural light, everyone has electric sit-stand desks, and we have some typical startup-type amenities such as snacks and a gym.
Please share some insight into Tack’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[JM] We try not to be arbitrary about anything, or do anything because that’s the way it was done yesterday. It’s a balance of providing process support and rigidity where it’s helpful or necessary, and having the confidence that things will work out when people are given the freedom to do the right thing. Iteration is good and inevitable.
I don’t think is controversial to say the biggest determiner of the success of any company are the people that work there, I’d extend that to include how well they work together. We’ve learned someone who might be a great contributor working in isolation but struggles for whatever reason in a team environment isn’t a fit with us; just about everything we do is done as part of a team. There’s a great book on working on technical teams called “Team Geek,” and the authors discuss the importance of humility, respect, and trust in a team environment. They are core to our philosophy.
“KinHR helps with those administrative tasks that sound simple, but aren’t, like onboarding and time off requests. Now that our team has gotten used to it, I can’t see ever going back to emails, shared folders, and spreadsheets.”
We began using KinHR to help improve and facilitate some existing processes we had, and formalize and better document some others. Possibly most significantly, while most people don’t like to be micromanaged, we’ve found people do like to be closely guided with their career path and want candid and structured feedback. The objectives and reviews process in KinHR helps us do this in a lightweight and reliable way and is better implemented than in any of the other tools we evaluated.
Anything notable going on lately?
[JM] While it’s not all we do, we’ve recently started to become a go-to agency for home automation, internet of things, and connected device manufacturers. We’ve always been interested in small screen, resource constrained devices, so this is a natural fit for us.
We’re currently hiring mobile software developers, including iOS and Android. We’ve been discussing having a physical office in San Francisco recently, and we’re interested in talking with developers both in Denver and San Francisco.
By Alex Yohn
May 16, 2016
This is the final piece in our multi-part series on smart hiring. This article takes a look at how any small company can communicate its values and position itself to attract the best talent it can. What many business owners might find surprising is roughly half the work here is done after a candidate is hired.
In the mid-90s, researchers gave a name to how prospective employers marketed themselves to candidates — “employer branding.”
Employer branding is in many ways a 1:1 analogue of consumer branding. It involves the creation of a value proposition, communicating a set of values, and influencing the way your company is perceived by a certain group of people.
And in many ways, talented candidates behave like consumers. Research from LinkedIn shows that more than half of people identify reputation as the No. 1 factor they take into account when considering a job at a company. This goes for huge global corporations and local boutique firms.
Therefore, to attract good people even small companies must understand and practice employer branding, and there are a couple of reasons why.
First, doing so lets you audit and improve your employee experience program — the set of experiences a new hire goes through from recruitment to onboarding to retention. Getting that right helps you retain talented employees and ultimately save money on hiring over the long-term.
Second, developing a strong employer brand gives you an advantage when competing with other companies for talent: That LinkedIn piece also notes that half of recruiters don’t know what their company’s employer brand is.
Here is how you can apply employer branding best practices to the entire hiring-onboarding-retention cycles in your company and turn that into a competitive edge.
Know Your Story, and Tell It When Hiring
Step one in developing your employer brand is to develop an employee value proposition — a compelling reason for someone to join your team, exactly as a unique value proposition gives customers a compelling reason to buy from you.
Universum, an employer branding consultancy doing some of the best work on this front anywhere in the world, emphasizes that this value proposition “should be distinctive, authentic, relevant and consistent.”
Once you have this nailed down, you can begin to unpack it by describing your company’s culture, its mission, its core values, and what perks resonate with your current team members. Then, it’s a matter of communicating those messages.
Fortunately, social media has dramatically amplified any company’s ability to do this. Here are three ways your company can leverage social media to communicate its employer brand naturally and effectively:
Show What Your Company’s Culture Looks Like in Practice
Jessie Kwak at SkilledUp points out that small companies can do something as simple as posting photos from a holiday party or a charity event to communicate those messages — and in fact this is an effective show-don’t-tell approach to demonstrating how your company lives its values.
Be Active on Employer Review Sites
“Companies need to be willing to weigh in on employer review sites like Glassdoor and Indeed,” Kwak writes. “The way a company responds — or doesn’t respond — to negative reviews can affect its employer brand.”
This can seem a little intimidating to a small business owner, and there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to respond to criticism on a Glassdoor review. Here is the right way: Be responsive, honest and transparent. “‘We appreciate that feedback and we’re actually looking for ways to expand our benefits package,’ is turning a negative into a positive,” Alicia Garibaldi, Glassdoor’s senior content marketing manager, tells Kwak.
Give Your Employees a Voice
“Times have changed,” Universum VP of Strategy and Advisory Richard Mosley writes at HBR. “The rise of social media has made companies a great deal more transparent. People are far more likely to trust a company based on what its employees have to say than on its recruitment advertising. This means that talent attraction relies far more heavily on employee engagement and advocacy.”
There is also a right way and wrong way to do this. The wrong way is to bug your team members to constantly retweet company news and Like any Facebook shares. That’s going to smack of inauthenticity.
Instead, Jess Hodkinson at Australian content marketing agency King Content has a few ways you can give your employees a real voice that accurately reflects your business:
Let team members share their ideas and wisdom on the company’s blog. “This will not only make employees feel engaged and part of the business, it also allows you to demonstrate the collective knowledge you have within the team,” she says.
Create living collaborative documents where it’s easy for everyone to share their ideas, too. These can serve as the raw materials for a blog post, a tweet or a LinkedIn post.
If someone on the team takes it upon herself to share an idea or a project — even one from outside of the company — with the team, take a share-alike approach and promote it on the company’s own social channels.
Communicating Your Employer Brand in Other Media
Don’t neglect non-social channels for getting your message out, however. You still need to consider all of your recruitment tools and materials, which are essentially touchpoints from the candidate’s perspective.
“Branded assets, such as landing pages and emails, reinforce your EVP while keeping your company in the line of sight to potential employees,” Sheridan Gaenger writes at the Findly blog. “Your employer brand is communicated through every aspect of your business, from your applicant tracking system, career sites, email campaigns, and through to your talent community.
“The manner in which your hiring managers and recruiters interact with prospective employees all relates back to how your candidates can and will receive your employer brand. It’s all of these motions that give your brand a voice and make it shine and stand out.”
Onboarding is an Equally Important Part of the Employee Experience
“When people join your company, they are either too excited or too nervous,” the team at Management Study Guide writes. “Both are extreme conditions, which you need to handle well.”
This is precisely why we spent so much time developing the onboarding features in our own software. We felt it was crucial for new hires to know exactly what they need to do to get ready for the new job. Management Study Guide breaks the onboarding process down into three distinct components that essentially function as employer branding touchpoints:
Induction of the new hire into the team. This is “when they have a real and firsthand experience. It’s when they discover if they have joined the right organization. The gap between what was promised and what is delivered can divert their attention.
When the work itself starts. “An organization with a good workplace culture will focus on building relationships and fostering friendships. New employees shouldn’t be overloaded with too much information and responsibilities. Let them settle in.
How they work with managers, particularly when an issue arises. “Managers must focus on the bigger picture instead of making [any issues] a matter of their ego. How conflicts are handled say a lot about your employer brand.”
Having a member of the team mentor new hires is a good way to smoothe over those touchpoints, Namely founder and CEO Matt Straz writes: “To make onboarding an even more special experience, consider assigning mentors and introducing new hires to senior team members at your company. Breaking the ice early on can ease nerves and make them feel welcomed.”
Veterans United Home Loans is a company that does onboarding incredibly well. It won ERE Media’s Best Onboarding Program award in 2013 and was named to Fortune’s list of best companies to work for in 2016.
Here is part of Veterans United Home Loans’ onboarding process, as described by the company:
“Veterans United has a unique two-day onboarding program focused on instilling the company’s values: be passionate, deliver results and enhance lives. Prior to an employee’s first day, he or she is sent a welcome card and a $10 bill. The individual is asked to spend that money being kind or helpful to someone else. During orientation employees discuss the impact their action had toward enhancing another’s life.”
Veterans United is a medium-sized company, but this strategy could be scaled down to a smaller company pretty easily. As long as enhancing lives is part of your employer brand — and communicated across different touch points during the recruiting and hiring phases — this is a perfect way to drive that point home and break the ice with a newcomer.
How the Right Positioning Can Help You Keep Talented Employees
“An important component of employer branding is creating an employer experience that makes current employees want to stay and makes prospective employees want to join the fun,” the Glassdoor team writes. “Large companies may tempt job candidates with upper-tier salaries and expensive benefits, but smaller companies can make employees just as happy without spending the big bucks.”
As someone becomes a veteran team member, it’s important for you to keep track of what perks or company values are important to them. For example, The Undercover Recruiter notes that more than two-thirds of employees wish their companies would do more to foster a sense of purpose, and this is often why good people take their talents elsewhere.
That’s why it’s important to hire for culture fit, and why your employer brand must accurately represent this culture.
Regardless of culture, though, all employees appreciate having their input valued and being given room to grow. That’s why talented people who are promoted internally will reward you with their dedication.
And doing this also helps you retain onboarding knowledge, The Undercover Recruiter notes in another piece. “While the manager will still need to recruit and train a replacement, the original employee may serve as a resource for training the new hire, as well as eliminating the need for recruiting a candidate to fill their new position.”
One really common request from our customers has been the ability to keep private notes on an employee. Well, we’re excited to announce Kin’s new Notes feature!
We also know many of you are spreading the word about Kin, which we’re super thankful for. To make it easier for you to suggest Kin to others, we’ve released a new referral program, where you’ll actually pay your friends to start using Kin. Read on to learn more!
New Feature: Private Notes
Need to keep a note on an employee that’s only for management’s eyes? Well, now you can. Both HR Managers (HRMs) and Managers can now keep private notes on employees. Creating them is easy: under an employee’s account there’s a new Notes section where private notes can be created, shared, and categorized.
HRMs have a bit more functionality with the new private notes feature than Managers. First, they can create and view notes for any employee, and choose not to share a note with an employee’s Manager. Whereas, Managers are only able to create and view shared notes for their direct reports, and those notes are always accessible to any HRM.
Questions or feedback on the new private notes feature? Hit us up at theteam@10.20.21.87.
Give a friend or former coworker $25!
We recently asked you all if you’d recommend Kin to people you know (friends, former coworkers, etc.) and we received a huge “HECK YES”. So we’ve made it easy to spread the word via our referral program. We’re giving a $25 credit to any new customer you refer, and it couldn’t be simpler to get them going.
How do you get started? Click the drop down menu in the top right of Kin and select ‘Refer Kin’ to get the ball rolling! You can refer as many people as you’d like, and Kin will automatically email them their link to create a new account and to redeem their $25 credit.
Stay Tuned
We’re busy bees over here, working on other sweet updates you all have been requesting! Soon we’ll be releasing enhancements to the team calendar and onboarding workflow. We’ll keep you posted!
If you have any questions on either of these new updates, please send us a note at theteam@10.20.21.87.
By Alex Yohn
May 9, 2016
This is the fourth piece in a multi-part series on smart hiring. This article explores what specific smart hiring tools can help a small company make better-informed hiring decisions, and what to look for in the tools your own team chooses.
Wired’s founding editor Kevin Kelly wrote several years ago that no company can spend too much time or effort on finding and hiring the right people. “The alternative is to manage tough, which is much more time consuming,” he said.
Of course, no company has unlimited time and energy to devote to hiring. Most don’t have the time and energy to devote to learning how to hire better through trial and error. This post should help smaller teams fast-forward through that trial and error.
A good starting point here would be Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, who writes extensively at Wired about how his company approaches hiring, particularly how Google assesses candidates. The core of its strategy involves two broad practices:
Structured interviews to assess how the person behaves and responds to specific situations, and
A handful of personality tests that gauge a candidate’s cognitive skills, conscientiousness and capacity for leadership.
Below are 10 tools that can help any company recreate Google’s methods of candidate assessments. But first, it’s important to understand how to navigate the $500 million universe of recruiting tools so you can find the right tool for your business’ specific needs.
How to Select the Right Personality Test
There won’t be a catch-all personality test that every company can use for its hiring. Different tests apply to assess leadership skills among salespeople and empathy among nurses, for example. Actually, most companies will find they need different personality tests for hiring across different departments.
They measure personal traits that don’t change over time.
They distill results into data that allow apples-to-apples comparisons among applicants.
They can assess how candid a candidate’s responses actually are.
They reliably produce the same results over and over again for the same person.
They have a track record of predicting job performance.
Further, University of Minnesota professor of industrial psychology Dr. Deniz Ones tells Talent Management that any assessments should also meet professional guidelines such as those laid out by
If you plan to grow quickly, or if your company already counts its team members by the dozen, it’s probably best to invest in software that can help automate the workflow for recruiting, screening and hiring candidates. The layers of complexity you could add to this process are nearly infinite, and the best tools for such processes simplify your work.
“As you consider an [applicant tracking system], it is important to find a system that can streamline and organize your recruiting workflow through automation, allowing you to handle a large volume of candidates without hefty amounts of paperwork,” Jared Lasonde at software company Bullhorn writes. “You should also ensure that its functionality will improve communication and foster a better alliance between your organization’s recruiters, hiring managers, and prospective applicants.”
The team at Jobvite has put together an exhaustive resource on how to choose this kind of software, and their guide brings up three further points worth mentioning here.
Make sure the software is scalable. “Scalable ATS systems work just as well with 100 applicants as they do with 10,000 applicants,” they write. “Ten thousand applicants might seem like a bit of a stretch, but it is better to make certain that your ATS system can support your big-picture objectives than to invest in a system that will let you down when you need it the most.”
Make sure it keeps you compliant with relevant laws. This includes the multiple regulations laid out by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs and any other federal regulations that might apply.
Make sure it offers analytics. Solid data will help you track performance, identify areas where you can improve, and discover any bottlenecks in your hiring process.
10 Tools to Look Into
With that said, here are several tools that will help you screen candidates meaningfully, manage the recruiting and hiring processes, and keep track of what parts of those processes get results.
The Predictive Index
The Predictive Index is one of the leading providers of behavioral, cognitive and skills assessment tools for businesses and other large organizations. The company backs its methodology with more than six decades of practical experience and scientific research.
EQ-i 2.0
MHS Assessments’ EQ-i 2.0 is a popular tool for exploring an individual’s emotional intelligence. It’s built on top of a 1-5-15 Factor Structure that delivers one score, which breaks down into five composite scores that reveal aptitude across 15 different emotional dimensions, including emotional self-awareness, assertiveness and stress tolerance.
StrengthsFinder
The Clifton StrengthsFinder, now owned by Gallup, is based on the work of the late Dr. Donald O. Clifton, whose research revealed a reliable system for discovering the skills, knowledge and talents each person possesses.
Nect
Nect has created an app that works for desktops, laptops and mobile devices to streamline most companies’ hiring processes. The app posts to relevant job boards and major outlets, automatically helps filter and sort candidates, and integrates with your everyday communication tools to connect with the applicants you select.
POP Screen
The Self Management Group’s POP Screen tool is designed specifically to vet great salespeople by assessing their talents, the levels of effort they’ve demonstrated in past roles, and their fit for the position for which they’ve applied.
Viasto
Viasto adds a layer of efficiency to your recruitment by helping you set up structured video interviews. This lets companies assess candidates who might not otherwise be in a position to meet face-to-face, but still with the rigor to identify the most qualified candidates.
Revelian
The Revelian’s Cognitive Ability Test assesses a candidate’s ability to acquire, retain, organize and apply various types of information. “People who score well on the Revelian Cognitive Ability Test are more likely to demonstrate strong job performance, make effective decisions, successfully reason and solve problems, [and] respond appropriately to new or complex situations,” the company writes.
Workable
Workable has created what Business News Daily has described as the best recruiting software for small businesses. The platform lets companies post job ads, process applications, manage interviews and even help onboard new hires.
Kaleo
Kaleo is a bit of an outlier on this list in that the software isn’t specifically designed for recruiting or hiring. Instead, Kaleo turns communication tools such as company email inboxes into collaboration platforms so that institutional knowledge can be shared easily.
“These ‘knowledge networks,’ which are curated by internal subject matter experts, are built around questions and answers, positioning Kaleo as sort of a Quora meets Slack meets Sidekick,” Matt Charney writes at Recruiting Daily. This capability could be especially useful in keeping your HR team up-to-date on regulations, and in onboarding new hires.
Talent Dojo
For companies that already have gained traction and a large audience, Qwalify’s Talent Dojo could be a powerful way to find candidates who fit your company’s culture. The platform combs your existing marketing channels to find brand advocates and audience members who already understand and promote what your company does. It can even assess who among those audience members are most engaged or most familiar with your company’s culture. Qwalify points out that recruiting from this perspective can save 75% of the time and money it would otherwise cost to hire someone.
