Emerging Trends, Talent Acquisition
Emerging Trends, Talent Acquisition
Closing the Hiring Execution Gap: Insights from our Summit in Oslo
Schibsted HR leader joins Alva Labs board ahead of expansion
Talent Acquisition, customer story
Knightec x Alva Labs: Data-driven recruitment shapes the future of tech
Product update: Structured interviews just got easier
First in the world to receive global DNV certification for psychometric assessments
Debunking common misconceptions about psychometric assessments in recruitment
How to make candidates love your hiring process
If your candidates aren't engaged, they're not applying. It's as simple as that. In an increasingly candidate-driven market, where 58% of candidates reject job offers due to a negative experience,...
Product updates in Alva: Data retention and improved user experience
We’ve recently made some important updates to our app that are designed to improve your experience and make the app more user-friendly. With core updates like improved candidate privacy features and...
How to master hiring for leadership roles
Being a leader is never easy. For people taking on a leadership role for the first time, mastering the skills and navigating the uncertainties that go with the job can be overwhelming. With over...
Recruitment with Speed & Structure: Noba's Success with Alva's Interview Templates
As a 'bank of banks,' Noba stands out as a financial pioneer with its sustainable, customer-centric approach and diverse vertical offerings. With over 2 million customers spread across its portfolio...
How Billogram boosted recruitment efficiency and enhanced candidate experience with Alva Labs
The modern talent market operates like a stress test, relentlessly probing and pressing talent acquisition strategies. It demands innovation, agility, and utmost efficiency.
Companies are propelled...
How Nobia mastered the art of volume hiring and candidate experience
In an age where global markets are rapidly evolving, it’s critical for companies to provide seamless and high-quality talent acquisition across diverse regions.
When Christa Buss stepped into her...
Accelerating Norway's Talent Race with NoA and Alva Labs
Good talent doesn't stay on the market long in Norway.
Confidently assess leadership candidates with Alva’s Leadership Report
How do you spot a candidate’s leadership potential, every time?
Introducing Alva's Leadership Report. It's our answer to the pressing challenge of modern-day leadership hiring and development....
Recruitment Automation Tech Stack: 4 Must-Haves for Modern TA
Today, technology dictates how we source, screen, and hire candidates. With new recruitment solutions popping up, talent teams may easily feel overwhelmed when choosing digital solutions. In this...
How to pick the right recruitment assessment tool for your hiring needs
The companies who stick to traditional selection methods—which are neither objective nor accurate— will fail to secure the right talent for their business success. This is a considerable risk to take...
Are your hiring practices holding you back? Discover the power of evidence-based recruitment
Getting hired and hiring has followed this simple formula for hundreds of years: You see the job ad, submit a CV and maybe a cover letter, and then go through a round of interviews. This recruitment...
Why your last hire failed- and what you can do about it
Almost half of all hires fail, with only 19% of hires deemed a "success". What are we getting wrong? And more importantly, what can we do right? Let's find out!
Solving High-Volume Recruitment: How Daniel Wellington Thrives with Alva
What does the phrase "serving up candidates on a silver platter" mean for a Talent Acquisition professional?
How to spot, hire and keep a high performer
The best talent do the best and the most work. But many companies need to do a better job of finding and keeping them. In fact, 82% of companies believe they need to hire more talented people. Today,...
Talent Acquisition-Hiring Manager alignment: A best-practice guide
8 talent sourcing tactics to improve your candidate response rate
Nowadays, talent sourcing feels impersonal. Generic. Rushed. Yet in a crowded labour market where the best candidates get snapped up in ten days, it's only more vital to get candidate sourcing right....
Transforming Talent Acquisition: Happy Socks' Journey with Alva Labs
Creativity reigns supreme at Happy Socks. From their eye-catching designs to the atmosphere at their colourful office in central Stockholm, the company has a deserved reputation for its uniqueness...
How to Write Better Job Ads: 10 tips from a tech recruiting expert
Gone are the days when you can copy and paste a generic ad and hope for the best. Simply put, candidates expect more. Nowadays, people are looking for a place to belong, a culture they can connect...
How Koenigsegg reduced its time to hire by almost 60% with Alva & Jobylon
Koenigsegg, renowned for its painstaking craftsmanship of state of the art hyper cars, applies the same exacting standards to its hiring process. With such a reputation for technical innovation, ...
How to use AI in recruitment
Today, talent acquisition teams use AI tools to reduce time to hire, increase productivity, and deliver an intuitive, seamless candidate experience. But AI can be complex to grasp, and given its...
Master the art of interviewing: The ultimate guide to conducting great interviews
You’ve found a candidate that looks good on paper. Now comes the hard part: the interview. How can you ask questions that predict good hires? How should you use this time to get to know the candidate...
Driving Equal Opportunity in Early Careers: Step Recruitment x Alva Labs
In the fractured marketplace of student and graduate recruitment, Step Recruitment faces a unique challenge: how to fairly assess early career talent efficiently at scale, while also promoting social...
Product launch: Transform your hiring process with Alva's new interview templates
How structured is your company’s interview process?
How to create a candidate-friendly interview process
There's nothing more frustrating than having your favourite candidate drop out of the application because of a messy interview process. Yet over 50% of candidates reject job offers because they don't...
Are you doing these four things to recruit tech talent?
The competition for top tech talent is as fierce as ever. To attract and recruit the best developers, you need to be doing more than just posting job ads online and hoping for the best. Here are four...
How to Create a Take-Home Coding Test that won't scare candidates
The take-home coding test. Both loved and hated by candidates, this coding task is typically given to tech talent to complete in their own time. Since the tests can be taken at home, candidates...
How to Attract and Hire Remote Talent
To truly widen your talent pool and stand out in today’s labour market, you must master the art of attracting and hiring remote talent. Here’s how.
Easily assess developer talent with Alva's Coding Tests
Hiring developers is hard, but it doesn't have to be. We're thrilled to introduce Alva's Coding Tests as a candidate-friendly solution to help companies identify and hire the best engineering talent.
Hiring Engineers in Tough Times: Guide for Talent Acquisition Managers
Talent Acquisition leaders around the world face difficult decisions about headcount and growth plans as 2023 continues to be an unsettling time for hiring professionals.
How reducing your time to hire helps optimise your recruitment process
In the competitive hiring world, your time to hire can make the difference between securing your dream candidate or losing talent to the competition. Yet only 30 percent of companies can fill a role...
Improving Mentimeter’s candidate experience with Alva’s coding tests
Since launching in 2012, Mentimeter has been empowering over 208 million users to engage with interactive presentations using their Audience Engagement Platform. The core values behind this mission –...
Why soft skills matter in sales talent assessment
In the competitive world of sales, it's common to focus on traditional measures of success such as technical knowledge, industry experience, and past performance. However, recent research has shown...
UK recruitment expert offers three predictions on the future of recruitment
We recently discussed where recruitment is heading with one of Britain’s foremost recruitment specialists, Hung Lee, in our How We Hire Podcast. Lee is also the editor of the popular Recruiting...
How to hire great software engineers
When hiring a software engineer, more than a CV and portfolio is needed to determine whether a candidate has what it takes to excel in the job.
Supporting employee mental health—a guide for managers
Managers play a critical role in employee happiness and job satisfaction. Yet 75% of workers say the most stressful part of their job is dealing with their immediate boss. What's more, only one in...
How to refresh your employee onboarding
Employees usually decide whether they feel welcome in a new organisation within the first month. That’s why it’s imperative to offer a great employee onboarding experience. But Gallup reports that ...
From DevSkills to joining Alva—a conversation with Anton Fenske on evaluating software engineers
Alva Labs sat down with DevSkills founder, Anton Fenske, to talk about the brains behind DevSkills, how Anton came to join Alva, and why hiring engineering talent is so challenging.
We’ve acquired DevSkills + Christoffer Norman joins Alva as new Chief Operating Officer
In 2017, we embarked on our mission to help recruiters qualify and compare job candidates with leading psychometric assessments. Today, we’re one major step closer to creating equal opportunities for...
How to build a strong employer brand and attract candidates
Would you blindly apply for a job without doing your homework on the company first?Most candidates wouldn’t. In fact, 77% of job seekers consider a company’s employer brand before submitting an...
Should you cut CVs out of your recruitment process?
The CV has been around since Leonardo Da Vinci wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan in 1482, requesting a work placement. But does this mean CVs are still as relevant today as they were 500 years ago...
What can employee advocacy on social media do for your brand?
What drives your brand? While an optimised website, email marketing strategy and social media are clear starting points, what about your employees? They know your business by heart and can add a...
What's new in Alva – automate admin tasks
How many tabs do you have open now? I'll go first, I’ve got 23 tabs open as I type this 😶
Hiring velocity: the talent acquisition metric that matters
When people talk about metrics in the talent acquisition (TA) space, they usually talk about time to hire. But hiring velocity is just as important a metric to pay attention to – arguably more so...
'Good candidates have so many options right now:' Alva Labs' Lisa Sindsjö Grahn on today's recruitment challenges
For the first-ever "Meet an Alvatar" series, we sat down with Talent Acquisition Manager Lisa Sindsjö Grahn. The Åmål, Sweden native joined Alva Labs in March 2022 and has an extensive background...
6 Employer Branding tips you can implement today
The major tech hubs across Europe are in a fight for talent. With companies across the continent hiring for growth, high quality candidates have more options than ever. In the time of The Great...
Rejlers x TeamTailor x Alva: Collaborating to Increase Diversity
Rejlers is one of the largest engineering consultancy firms in the Nordics, but its outdated HR processes were still using CVs to screen candidates - and even using manual processes.
Alva Guide to the Big Five: Emotional Stability Explained
For the last post in our series on the Big Five, we’re looking into the trait that’s the most closely related to our feelings: emotional stability. The benefits of staying calm and composed in the...
Alva Guide to The Big Five: Agreeableness Explained
No one character difference causes as many problems as miscommunication. Ever had a colleague that you constantly seemed to misunderstand? Ever got annoyed that your significant other doesn’t seem to...
Alva Guide to the Big Five: Extraversion Explained
The social lion, the natural leader, the life of the party – cliches trying to articulate the nature of Extraversion abound. As we enter the third chapter in our series on the Big Five personality...
Alva Guide to The Big Five: Conscientiousness Explained
Next up in our blog series on the Big Five is Conscientiousness – the trait that has turned out to predict job performance in almost all job roles. But what does conscientiousness mean? And are there...
Alva Guide to The Big Five: Openness Explained
In this blog series, we’re going to walk you through all the five traits of the Big Five model, and hopefully show you just how rich, fascinating, and multifaceted they are. Let’s start with the most...
Your Alva Guide to the Big Five Model of Personality
No model of personality has more support in academic research than the Big Five, or the Five Factor model. If you’re working in talent acquisition, it’s likely that you’re looking for personality...
What's new in Alva: Flex pricing
From a hybrid workforce to volatility in hiring forecasts, the global pandemic has revolutionized hiring in many ways over the past two years. Many leaders in recruitment identified difficulties in...
8 strategies you need to build diverse staff retention
“No-one’s buying the excuse of unconscious bias anymore” says, Nikky Lyle, Global Talent and Executive Search Director and TEDx expert. “Companies can say ‘We’re so diverse’, but if there are no...
Talent Sourcing: 31 tips to fill that vacancy
Per Tjernberg is a Chief Innovation Officer at RecPro Recruitment Professionals. Per joined us to discuss if, in Spring 2022, there really is a talent shortage, and why recruiters can’t just bemoan a...
11 steps to help Hiring Managers prioritise potential in hiring
Engaging colleagues to move from insisting on years of experience as a metric isn't easy. Whether you're helping to shift the mindset of an HM or a founder, here’s a reframing exercise you can use to...
Your Ultimate Guide to Interview Scorecards
“HR is about making sure an organisation can do a good job. Setting up realistic processes, measuring what works, constantly adjust an improving” says Linnea Bywall, our head of People and...
How to engage a company wide shift to Hiring Manager Responsibility.
Jens Engrund, Talent Manager in the Services Division at Teledyne FLIR, had to restructure recruitment in teams crossing EMEA & APAC. With the team of 10 TAs lost in a restructure, hiring...
How to keep every candidate engaged
Have you heard the chat about breadcrumbing in recruitment? In recruitment, breadcrumbing is ‘recruiters stringing candidates along with the promise of a job offer that will never appear’. So, not...
FLIR x Alva: Collaborating to find potential
Teledyne FLIR is the global leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of Thermal Imaging Infrared Cameras. Scaling fast, with over 120 hires a year but no Talent Acquisition team, new Talent...
Chief Wellbeing Officers: why you need one (& what to do if you can't afford one)
The American Medical Association reports that burnout levels are at an all-time high: nearly 3 in 5 employees report negative impacts of work-related stress, including lack of interest, motivation,...
Why your next candidate isn't looking for you (and why that doesn't matter)
70% of people in work are passive job hunters, interacting with brands and businesses through the 2.5 hours a day they spend scrolling through social media.Sara Dalsfelt, Head of Social Selling at ...
Why intuition is your best friend and your worst enemy
Is intuition ever useful in hiring? Can it help us make that ‘devil in the detail’ choice? Or are data and algorithms always the way to go? In this blog post, we’ll take a deep-dive into academic...
The 7 questions you need to ask your psychometric assessment vendor
Alva’s assessment tools use IRT logic. What IS this, you ask?
The 7 hiring tools every startup CEO needs
At the Sifted Summit 2021, HR leaders estimated that CEOs spend around 40% of their time on hiring. Whether you're starting out and you don't have a recruiter, or you're scaling up and you're...
Where is Swedish Diversity & Inclusion heading in Swedish companies?
On 8 December 2021, Alva brought together members of the Stockholm HR and Talent Acquisition space to have an open conversation around Swedish Diversity & Inclusion. On stage leading the discussion...
Why Psychological Capital is the insight you need to build 2022’s resilient team
We all know that person who, despite multiple setbacks and tough periods, perseveres. They even achieve beyond expectations. They rarely pass us by unnoticed as they keep their heads high and deliver...
How Lyko modernised and scaled its Candidate Experience
Moa Wictorén, CHRO of Nordic cosmetic giant Lyko, had a problem. The company was enjoying rapid growth, boasted a dynamic internal culture, and had a huge following of dedicated customers. But their...
Sifted Summit: What HR Leaders need to know
Sifted, the FT’s start-up specialist platform, held their first founder’s Summit in London’s iconic Science Museum on Thursday 8th December 2021. Bringing together a diverse group of founders,...
Stop saying soft skills!
The World Economic Forum estimates that 40 percent of today’s job skills will have changed in just five years, and that an astounding 1 billion people - 12% of the world’s population - will need...
How foodora uses Alva to scale competitively
About the author: With three years of recruitment experience backed by a degree in Psychology, foodora recruiter Olivia Winkvist understands the value of having technology in the recruitment process...
Why Independent Contributors are key to your success
Ninety percent of our workforce isn’t made up of managerial staff; it’s made up of the people that they manage. So when we’re thinking about how to progress that 90% of people, we cannot just expect...
How to assess leadership potential
“Promotions are a vital part of the career advancement process in organizations.” DeSouza, 2002. Why? When we work, we hope that we’re using our skills and talents in the service of something bigger...
The Horn Effect – what is it and how can you prevent it from damaging your organisation
Ever read a CV with a word that was misspelled? Found yourself mumbling things like “sloppy”, “dumb” or similar and then put that CV in the rejection pile? Well my friend, then you have fallen victim...
Your next promotion is going to fail unless you take action.
Nearly 40% of all internal promotions end in failure. There are many reasons for this: the usual suspects apply, we don’t think deeply enough about why we’re making promotions and, too often, we end...
Why increasing your talent pool will help you find hidden talent - and beat your competition
In June 2021, Gallup found that 57% of U.S. workers want to update their skills and 48% would consider switching jobs to do it.
So with 52% of people willing to leaving employers who don’t support...
Streamline your processes, save time - and still discover untapped talent.
Like the rest of the world, I’ve recently watched (well, binge watched) Squid Game. In the first episode, player 001 is left with casting the deciding vote on whether the Game should continue or end....
Where is Your Talent Engagement Strategy Leaking? Plug the gaps before you lose your next great hire.
Leaks in your talent funnel are stressful - you know that you’re missing out on great talent, and with each hire costing roughly US$4,000 & 52 days of effort, mistakes are costly. We can’t optimise...
The 8 steps in the hiring process you should cheat on (and the 5 you can’t afford to miss)
There are many different ways to impact performance within your organisation. Well-planned onboarding, though-through re-skilling and up-skilling, structured goal-setting. The list can be long. But...
7 quick tips to foster psychological safety in your teams - today
Ever been in a group or team where you didn’t feel comfortable raising a question or concern? Ever been in a group or team where you felt you could be yourself without being judged? Then you know the...
Want to build psychologically safe teams? Hire a great manager.
A 2017 Gallup report found that just “3 in 10 U.S. workers strongly agree that at work, their opinions seem to count.” What’s another term we could use to talk about team members knowing that their...
How you can get all you need from a Chief Transformation Officer (without hiring one)
As the world around us continues to change at an even faster pace, every organisation needs to find a way to keep up. Enterprises and businesses that succeeded and grew during the pandemic were able...
Game-Based Assessments: The Future of Psychometrics or a New Shiny Thing?
Game-based assessments have received increasing attention over the last few years. Some portray them as the future of psychometric assessment – others are more skeptical. What do we know about this...
Is your choice of psychometric test creating noise - and wasting your time?
When we think about one of the most humdrum and annoying parts of lockdown, it was family and work life butting up against each other - two competing work calls over one kitchen table, your partner...
DevOps 101: Who they are, what they do and how to hire them.
A strong DevOps team is essential to making your product reliable - to make sure it is resilient to failure and fast to recover when you hit a glitch. But what exactly does a DevOps team do, why does...
Talentech: HR ecosystem experts
We are proud to announce our latest partnership: Alva Labs and Talentech.
8 questions to ask before you start your first job ad video (and the answers)
Making a video to communicate your next job ad doesn’t need to take a huge amount of time behind the camera. But like any piece of communications work, you don’t just chuck any old content out there...
Why onboarding starts before your next hire.
1 in 5 recruits leave a job after only 45 days and, if current trends continue, employee turnover is only going to increase as Millennials move from job to job with greater fluidity, moving from...
Optimise employee engagement with these seven tips
Employee engagement starts with listening to your team's needs and making sure that they are recognised. It can also be about making sure there's a birthday card, an acknowledgment of family...
Want engaged employees? Start by hiring them.
When we think about supporting and engaging our workforce, we can look to the US$6BN employee engagement industry to support us. In today’s candidate driven market, with The Great Resignation...
Employer Branding 101 for Start-Ups & small teams
72% of recruiting leaders say that employer branding has a significant impact on their hiring by helping them to find top performing talent. In today’s candidate centred market, having a clear,...
Is your anti-bias training decreasing bias - or giving you a false sense of security?
In the first in our series of breaking down research papers into what you need to know and why, Senior Customer Success Manager Philip Ström asks: Is it possible to reduce bias through training? How...
How recruitment bias harms your business
As HR professionals, we know that practising the principles of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in our hiring processes is essential. In Sweden, most companies would say this is a key element of...
How hiring for soft skills builds your team's resilience & growth potential
We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution and a skills transformation. The World Economic Forum estimates that 40 percent of today’s job skills will have changed in just five years, and...
Why one process is all you need to find your next hire.
Before founding Alva, we’d worked at start-ups, scale ups and research institutions, at non-profits, in banking and in retail. We’d all been responsible for hiring new staff, and, if we’re honest our...
How to streamline feedback in your recruitment - today
Recruitment processes are time-consuming and expensive. It’s essential to do everything possible to ensure that when the job offer is made, there is a high acceptance rate. So how exactly can you do...
11 Action points to help you to start a candidate-centred recruitment process
81% of candidates say that the one main thing that would greatly improve their overall application experience is employers continuously communicating status updates.In today's candidate-driven...
Alva Product Updates in under 10 minutes
Understanding what makes people tick is not an achievable, end-able goal. Work on improving our algorithms and tests isn’t ever finished because people are endlessly fascinating, new findings will be...
Why judging candidates on years of experience could be increasing bias in your recruitment.
When we’re thinking about adding a new person to our team it’s because we need them to do a job. We need them to crack on, from that first Monday morning - to join in the real or virtual coffee...
Why SEB chose Alva to join their path to increased diversity
Everything starts with an opportunity, according to Sam Joukhadar, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at SEB. The opportunity to express yourself and make a personal impression, regardless of age,...
Why you don’t need a values test in recruitment
The topic of work life values has been raised recently in the media. It has become increasingly common to use recruitment tests that try to capture job candidates’ values, in order to determine their...
Time to focus on the candidate experience
Recently, a debate about tests has sparked in the media. Job seekers speak of tests that they find irrelevant, time-consuming, and hard to understand. According to Alva, the call to action is clear:...
How To Pick The Perfect Hiring Test For Your Business
Maybe you want to use personality tests as part of your hiring process, or you’re simply curious about the science behind personality tests and which hiring test is the most scientifically objective....
Reducing turnover rates at call centers
Employee turnover is an unfortunate reality in any company, but even more so among call centers. Call centers typically have a turnover rate between 30 - 45%. By comparison, the employee turnover...
Should You Tell Talents They Are Talents?
–Should you tell your employees that they have been identified as talents, and indirectly—that others have not?
How to maximise your recruitment ROI
It’s the companies who find a way to define and calculate the value of their employees that can improve the quality of hires and increase their financial bottom line. In other words, it’s all about...
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