In the past few weeks, the world has experienced dramatic changes in several ways. The job market has especially been walloped, experiencing job cuts work opportunities being hard to come by.  https://gigster.com/thought-leadership/6-signs-that-the-future-of-work-is-here-today/ Gigster, brings together top talent from all over the world to help companies grow! This article reiterates the fact that “Work from home is the new normal.” How to get your Career Back on Track: The COVID-19 pandemic might put your career on halt for some time and affect you in ways you didn’t expect. You’ll find yourself in the valley of hard decisions. During a crisis, the urge to hide is strong, but instead, it should be an opportunity for positive change. In the place of panic and fear, take this time to prepare for a career comeback. Here are some tips you can use to reinvent yourself in the marketplace once the crisis is over.  Prepare Mentally Most organizations are doing the best they can to retain their employees. Unfortunately,  others may have no option but to let them go. If you suffer a job loss during this time, don’t lose your self-confidence.  Just because one opportunity slipped off your hands doesn’t mean you aren’t good enough for another one. Work on your confidence by analyzing your strong career skillsets. Avoid the temptation to sulk or hold a pity party for yourself.   Gauge Your Career Options Picture Credit: Pixabay When there’s a national or global economic turndown, it’s essential to be realistic and well-informed about your career options. Do you expect a transition from your current job to another? If, so, consider the types of transitions possible.  Your options include getting a different career within the same industry. You may also look for a similar job in a different industry or change your job and industry altogether. Here’s a great place to get started and you can find one that’s looking for your specific skills or experience. Here, your decision will significantly be influenced by trending job openings. Even as the economy seems to slow down, some industries seem to do really well. Most of them remain unaffected since demand is inelastic to price and income changes.  Don’t Despise a Returnship A returnship is more like an internship that targets experienced professionals. The most significant difference is that you don’t end up back at the bottom of the ladder. It lasts a few weeks to a few months, and your level of experience determines your remuneration. During the returnship, you’ll be provided with extra training and membership. You’ll be in the best position to reacquaint yourself with a new work culture as you improve dormant skills.  Different companies are launching formal returnship programs, and you may as well take advantage of them. It’ll allow you to see if it’s the right career path you want to make. If it is, you might even end up getting hired.  Think Small Businesses Picture Credits: Pixabay Having your mind on small businesses could be in one of two ways. First, you may have tried to get hired by big companies without much success. Large organizations use resume systems that may filter out your resume.  This is where you change your tactics. Express your interest in small businesses looking to hire new personnel. Most of them are willing to take chances, and once you’re in there, your chances of growth are almost guaranteed. Secondly, you might think of creating your own small business. You might think that you need to have tons of money and hire many people. However, use your strong skills to start a business that brings out the best in you without costing you much.  Finally...

  Finding the right candidate to fill an open job position has always been a challenging task, and the fact that the monetary cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30% of the employer’s first-year earnings only adds to the pressure. During the process, you need to ensure that you attract, hire and retain the right talent, so that your company may reap the benefits of having a skilled, engaged and productive workforce, instead of suffering because of bad hiring choices. Fortunately, with all the advancements it brings, AI has also taken the world of recruitment by storm. Many HR experts now leverage AI-powered tools to help them locate and attract potential candidates, build meaningful relationships with high-profile applicants, and make smarter hire choices. Here are the four most important ways AI can assist in recruiting talent. 1. Attract Great Candidates One of the most significant challenges HR departments face is attracting skilled staff, as 87% of HR experts claim that there is a lack of qualified applicants for the positions they are trying to fill. However, the quality of your job applicants largely depends on the initial candidates you’ve attracted to your job posting. To get more applications that match your job posting, and fewer of those who are over- or under- qualified, your job description needs to represent what you’re looking for in candidates accurately. AI-powered tools, such as Textio, can help you come out with a perfect job description that is tailored to address the needs of your potential job candidates. This AI tool analyzes over 10 million job ads each month. Due to its extensive database, and NLP capabilities, Textio gives you suggestions on how to adjust your job description depending on your industry, and offers you alternatives that better match your target audience. If you sound better to your target candidates, you’ll attract more high-profile candidates from the talent pool. 2. Improve the Quality of Recruitment Even though we hate to admit it, the recruitment process is always biased. A study has found that people with no facial flaws are more likely to get a job. When certain imperfections exist, the attention of the job interviewers will mostly be focused on these facial differences, instead of on what the candidates are saying. AI can make the recruitment process unbiased, as it can help you determine objective criteria, and act on these criteria alone when narrowing down choices and making a selection. Besides, during an interview, AI can spot some other vital characteristics that the human eye can’t easily capture. For example, in an attempt to find perfect matches for their open positions, Unilever uses neuro-science based games, as well as facial expression analysis to assess their candidates’ personalities and honesty. After the interview, the algorithm comes up with a review of each candidate, making it much easier for the HR department to make a final selection. Learn the Art and Science of Resume and CV Writing – Job Search Skills, LinkedIn and Interview Skills all Included! 3. Provide Your Candidates With Better Experience The HR department can now successfully use conversational chatbots to engage with candidates during the recruitment phase, and significantly improve their experience with a potential employer. An AI chatbot can be used to answer candidates’ most common questions, to inform them about the status of their application, and update them on all the recent developments. Many companies don’t follow up with their top candidates after the interview, which severely damages their reputation and their chances of making the best hires. AI chatbots can be there to keep the communication lines with the top candidates open, showing them respect and...

For employees working within the fast-paced world of modern industry, the workplace can sometimes feel like a treadmill that never lets up. As a manager, employer or business owner, it’s your responsibility to ensure that those working within your company can do so in a safe and positive environment. Creating better workplaces allows individuals and teams to achieve their best results, so it’s very much in the interest of everyone going forward. That said, let’s take a look at some easy to implement techniques that can help to encourage a positive atmosphere for your team. Keep Your Employees Motivated and On-Task  In order to get the most from your employees, it’s crucial that they remain motivated, engaged and focused on the task at hand. When minds wander so too does performance. There are several ways to do this. In production environments, it’s par for the course that employees will be carrying out similar tasks day in day out, and this repetition can lead to boredom and low productivity. Try to ensure that staff who are carrying out repetitive tasks cycle through a few different roles on a daily or even weekly basis, that way, reducing the chance for boredom to take hold and keeping them focused on the task at hand. Check out this guide from Inc on how to keep your employees motivated and on task. Regular Service and Maintenance of Machinery  A safe working environment is always conducive to positivity in employees, and one of the best ways to ensure that your workers are safe, especially in an industrial setting, is to keep on top of regular service and repair. Maintaining machinery such as a conveyor belt entails regularly checking fluids and oils and changing spare parts and consumables at specified intervals or where necessary. In order to ensure your machinery is running, safely follow your user handbook down to the letter and be sure to report anything unusual for a follow-up investigation. Faulty machinery can cause injury or even worse, so it’s not the time nor place to cut corners. Visit fluentconveyors.com today and find out more about the parts, service and repair packages they offer for conveyor belt customers across the globe. Create a Positive Working Environment for Staff  Creating a positive environment is crucial if you’re looking to get the most from your staff and there are many ways this can be achieved. It might be worth considering promoting or rewarding high achieving teams and individuals as a way of getting the message across that hard work pays off. Additionally, make sure that employees have a safe space to get away from their work such as a canteen or rest area. Having a comfortable place to relax and take a break from work, particularly in a noisy industrial environment, can make a real difference to the health, happiness and wellbeing of your workers. Taking the time to invest in your people is one of the safest bets for improving the production capabilities of your business and there are multiple ways to achieve success in this regard. Playing the long game and investing in better environments, safer workplaces and including better rewards for your workers will make a huge difference and in the end, will result in improved...

If you want to ensure that your employees are remaining on track with regards to their work and that they are hitting all of their important deadlines, you must analyze their performance at all times. Fortunately, thanks to the rise of workforce analysis solutions, performing this all-important task need not take up too much of your precious time. Here are three effective employee performance analysis solutions that are currently made available to you: Performance management technology Performance management technology is definitely something that you should consider using in your bid to keep a track of your workforce. As its name suggests, this type of tech solution will help you to measure, manage and analyze how your employees perform on an ongoing daily basis. Should you decide to make use of this effective employee analysis solution, it’s imperative that you invest in a system that has proven itself capable of increasing productivity in your industry. To uncover this type of essential information, it’s important that you check out past success stories. If a performance management technology provider doesn’t provide this kind of background information, then don’t trust them. The XCD cloud-based system is one software solution that you can trust in this instance. A number of its past success stories are posted on its site peoplexcd.com, allowing you to see just how they have assisted organizations like yours in the past. With this information at hand, you will be able to make a more informed decision with regards to whether or not this is the right software solution for you. Peer reviews You don’t necessarily have to turn to technology in your bid to analyze your workforce’s ongoing performance. Peer reviews can be just as effective when it comes to finding out which of your employees are currently working well and producing the best work. Peer reviews are a relatively easy way for you to attain inside information on how your employees are performing. Going down this analysis route will simply entail you asking your staff members to review their colleagues. If you want to attain thorough feedback from your workforce in this instance, you should ask them the following questions: How well does your coworker communicate with the rest of your team? What strengths does your coworker possess? Does your coworker regularly hit their deadlines? Meet with your staff regularly There’s nothing quite like sitting down with your employees to discuss their performance with them. Meeting with your staff regularly will allow you to keep your finger on the pulse of their latest performance levels. What’s more, it will give you a platform from which you can either congratulate them for their hard work or ask them to perform better going forward. Should you decide to hold performance meetings regularly, be sure to cover the following objectives: Provide customer feedback Talk about what you’ve noticed recently Follow up on peer reviews If you want your employees to operate in a highly optimized fashion at all conceivable points, then it’s imperative that you analyze their performance levels at all...

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Increase Employee Engagement Employee engagement is crucial to the success of your business; without engaged employees,  your business will have a tough time expanding. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are actively disengaged in their workplaces. Disengaged employees are less effective at their work, and can contribute to a drop in company revenue over time. Here are some ways that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help keep your workforce engaged and working at their full potential. Robotic Process Automation Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is a great tool to remove repetitive tasks from your employees every-day routine. RPA harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence by using digital software robots, or “bots”, to automate existing business processes. The Artificial Intelligence aspect of the bots enables them to work with “unstructured data” without hitting snags or complications. RPA can be applied to almost every industry and can help you become more efficient and save money in the long run. RPA has the power to increase employee engagement in a number of ways, the first being an increase in their mood. An IBM study on “The Financial Impact of a Positive Employee Experience” shows that “organizations that score in the top 25 percent on employee experience report nearly three times the return on assets compared to organization in the bottom quartile.” Making sure that your employees are happy and engaged can prove helpful for your bottom line. Removing repetitive tasks can also lead to an increase in creativity for your employees as they are being tasked with more challenging and thought-provoking work. Additionally, removing the monotonous work with RPA can provide more opportunities for upward mobility for workers, as more jobs now requiring a higher level of skill and insight. Picture Courtesy: Zibtek While a business is more than the sum of its parts, the truth is that workflows can either give a business the edge or keep it from growing. Here is a resourceful guide from Quandary Consulting Group to process improvement that covers the subject in full. Read on: Process Improvement: Cut Waste and Improve Business Efficiency Professional Development & Predictive Behavior Artificial Intelligence shows great promise for being able to help in the personal development of current employees. Using AI, companies are able to create personalized training programs for employees, which can align the material with different employees’ learning patterns and behaviors. Using this, employers can then target the specific needs of employees, instead of having to create blanket training that can often be repetitive to many. If a training program is largely computer-based, then AI can actually serve as the instructor for the course, creating more time for other training. AI technology has proven useful in its predictive behavior aspect and can be used in businesses to gain detailed information on why employees leave the company, enabling them to take preventive measures in the future. Picture Courtesy: Docebo Artificial Intelligence helps human resources develop more personalized feedback on an employee’s work, and more personal responses to any issues they might be having. This helps employees feel more valued at a company and can increase their engagement. Employee training programs are crucial for keeping an employee engaged in their work. If an employee is confused about any part of their task, and feels unable to ask for assistance, they will be less engaged in their job. In addition, you can use AI to help train employees on newer aspects of the company to keep furthering their development and open up new opportunities for them. AI can help identify factors that push employees to leave a company, allowing employers to...