There’s no sugarcoating it: 2020 was a hard year. When we face challenges as a business, we know we need to keep growing and adapting. This year, we helped our clients make the right hires, developed and shared our hiring expertise, improved our product, and innovated on our company’s processes and culture so that we can better serve our clients in the years to come.
Below are some of our silver linings from a difficult 2020.
Helped our clients make the right hires
At the beginning of the COVID-19, many businesses shut their doors while they adjusted to running a business during a global pandemic. Hiring the right people went from being the number-one challenge business owners face to not even making the top ten list.
Knowing this, we worked with clients who were most affected by the pandemic to freeze their billing while they got their businesses back up and running. Like our Founder & CEO, Clint Smith, said in an email to our team: It was the right thing to do.
Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, our clients found creative ways to deal with setbacks. Over the year, our clients accomplished the following:
We want to give special thanks to our 2.6K clients who made their first hire with CareerPlug this year — we were able to plant as many trees in Brazil and Zambia in their honor through our partnership with WeForest!
While some industries saw a reduction in staffing needs, other industries increased their hiring. To help new clients hiring during the pandemic, we launched a “Hire Up” initiative, in which we offered a 60-day free trial of our hiring software along with a 30-day free trial of ZipRecruiter sponsored jobs.
Developed and shared our hiring expertise
Uncertainty was undoubtedly a theme of 2020. To combat this uncertainty, we conducted original research to give our clients the necessary data to understand the workforce’s needs during COVID-19 and hiring trends that will continue into 2021.
Delivered data-informed hiring best practices
By keeping up with hiring trends and best practices, we were able to help our clients figure out how remote hiring and remote onboarding could work for them during unprecedented times.
Here are more of our top achievements from 2020:
Original Research Studies and Reports
- 2020 Recruiting Metrics: Benchmark Data by Industry
- COVID-19 Employment Report: Measuring the Impact on Workers
- 2020 Candidate Experience Report
- 2021 Hiring Trends Report
Read all of our 2020 hiring insights on the CareerPlug blog.
Trained our team of Hiring Experts
This year, we invested internally in our team. All of our employees have completed our professional development curriculum and are now certified Hiring Experts. They’re now better equipped than ever to help our clients make the right hires.
Improved our product
We’re committed to providing our clients with the most powerful technology to help them make the right hires. The more we innovate, the more our system evolves.
Here’s what we accomplished this year:
Launched a redesigned user interface
The bulk of our work was redesigning our software, with client feedback in mind, to make it more intuitive to use.
As we do with all of our features, we met with stakeholders to figure out what they needed from us that we weren’t delivering, and we encouraged feedback from clients after features launched. We’ll keep innovating on our new interface, called Voyager, in the new year (and beyond!).
Added new job board partners
We helped our clients maximize their applicant volume in 2020 by adding two new job board partners: Facebook Jobs and Monster.com.
Facebook Jobs has quickly become a major player in the recruiting space and has been a significant source of applicants for our clients — they received more than 900,000 applications from Facebook Jobs this year.
We also strengthened our partnerships with existing job board partners. In February, we became an Indeed Star Partner. In June, we launched a partnership with ZipRecruiter — all new clients get a free 30-day trial of ZipRecruiter sponsoring when they post their first job with us.
Made it easier and quicker to contact applicants with just one click
Fun fact: 30% of job seeker respondents to a CareerPlug survey ranked responsiveness after they apply as most important to them when it comes to candidate experience. Candidates are looking for prompt and clear communication as they evaluate their interest in a position.
CareerPlug’s hiring process automations allow our clients to do just that. With CareerPlug automations, hiring managers can review and email their new applicants with professional, pre-written email templates with only one click. This helps our clients get as many interviews as they can as quickly as possible.
Helped prevent interview no-shows
One of the biggest hiring challenges many of our clients face is interview no-shows. These no-shows waste time, which is especially valuable for our clients who are small business owners, responsible for both running their business and hiring.
For clients who use our text messaging feature, CareerPlug sends automatic interview reminders to applicants. This saves our clients time and allows them to focus on what matters most: running their business.
Integrated with myCNAjobs.com
In September, we partnered with myCNAjobs.com to drive high volume recruiting for home care agencies across the nation. This is just one way we’ve been able to help clients with essential workers improve their recruiting and make the right hires.
Innovated our company structure and culture
Like many businesses, we were forced this year to grow and change in ways we’d never have imagined. We needed to focus on what matters most: being a great place to work for our employees and having the vision, values, and leaders in place to do right by our clients.
Went remote-first
After our team had been working remotely for months, we talked with them about what they still needed to feel supported, and it turned out that they had fully adapted to working remotely and were happy to continue doing so. So we decided to be a remote-first company, forever, in the summer of 2020.
We know the heart of our business is wherever our employees work — from our space in Austin, to a home office on Lake Michigan, to an outfitted van exploring the American West (true story!).
We’re proud to share our remote-first vision and tips for other companies to build their own.
Restructured and revitalized our core values
This year we saw the opportunity to provide better education to our clients on how to use our software and hire with confidence! We re-evaluated our organizational structure to ensure we had the right people in the right roles, creating a new Client Engagement team and investing in our Hiring Expert Team so they can better serve our clients.
As part of this change, we re-imagined our company vision and values. We’d had the same seven core values since 2007, but we realized that was too many! We boiled down our core values to the following four:
These values embody who we are and guide how we hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize one another. They are in our language, in our decisions, and in the heart of our culture.
Developed new leaders
We’re welcoming Jenny Leman as the new President of CareerPlug starting in 2021! Jenny joined our Operations Team in 2017 and has stepped up to help us develop the processes that we need to continue to grow and evolve.
CareerPlug’s Founder & CEO, Clint Smith, will continue to focus on the big picture, setting the vision for the business and developing new ideas to move us forward. Jenny will manage our day-to-day operations and processes — much like she has been doing for some time, if we’re honest.
We want to leave you with this quote from Clint Smith:
“A big theme of 2020 — for all of us — was learning to cope with events and factors that we cannot control. It’s because of our clients, who found creative ways to deal with setbacks, that we were able to cope with changes as well, and even grow from them. We’re looking forward to continuing our work in 2021 to help our clients hire and empower people to reach their potential.”
