The United Kingdom region will be available for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent beginning February 2019. This means that you can create environments in the United Kingdom region and all Talent data will be maintained solely within United Kingdom. You can create an environment in the United Kingdom region by selecting that option in the New environment dialog and use that environment to provision Talent in LCS as described here (Provision Talent).

Data migration of existing projects from other regions to the United Kingdom region is not supported. Only new projects can be provisioned to the United Kingdom region.

The post Provision Talent in United Kingdom appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract was released in summer 2017. Usage of the app has been consistently increasing and we have received lots of feedback and input on how we can help to modernize your recruiting process. Foundational to all of the coming changes is a dramatic change in the overall look and feel of Attract to improve the navigation experience and prepare for many great new capabilities to come.

Tailoring the hiring process to your organization’s need was one of the biggest asks we received since the release last year. We heard your strong feedback and enable now to customize the hiring process using stages and activities. Hand in hand with this change we also introduce a new activity feed pattern on an application level which visualizes state and process of an application clearly to hiring manager and recruiter.

These are just a few of the new capabilities and experiences of the new release of Attract. Over the next weeks we will publish a series of blog posts highlighting the new capabilities in more detail and how they are solving your recruiting pains.

In this post we will start with the advancements in our interview scheduling tool, but look forward to additional blog posts highlighting how our other upcoming capabilities are helping you solve your recruiting pain points.

The consequences of inefficient scheduling tools

No one – hiring managers, recruiters, or team members – wants to lose a candidate to the competition due to delays in schedules. At the same time, scheduling consumes a massive amount of time in the hiring process and is complicated by the need to match multiple candidate schedules with multiple interviewer schedules, communicating the schedule, and managing changes throughout. Some organizations staff or outsource entire teams just to handle this complex task, because with candidate experience at the forefront of the war for Talent, getting every aspect of the experience is critical.

Last-minute changes to the schedule abound in the hiring process, from interviewer illnesses to urgent conflicting meetings to traffic delays. The net result is someone can’t make scheduled times and gives notice 2 hours before the interview, but you’ve already got your candidates in town and ready to go. Multiply that problem by ten candidates, or ten jobs, or 100. Not being able to quickly adapt your schedule, at scale, by finding and swapping interviewers, or finding free conference rooms can leave a unprofessional impression on candidates and damage your talent brand.

Candidates are precious, discover more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract is uniquely positioned to keep them on schedule, in the loop, and vested in your unique employment opportunity.

Scheduling how it should be

Candidates often feel disconnected or secondary throughout the scheduling process.  Building the best relationship means keeping candidates in the forefront through the hiring process.

Start with the Talent. Attract starts by putting the candidate first out the gate, by creating the schedule around the candidate’s availability. It allows you to easily communicate with the candidate from Attract, directly to their preferred communication medium, to build the schedule for a date the candidate is comfortable with.

Centralize your scheduling. Hiring managers and recruiters often are challenged with coordinating the scheduling between interviewers and candidates.  With Attract hiring managers and recruiters can painlessly complete all steps scheduling an interview in one place, with no need to switch between different tools, reducing headache and maximizing efficiency so they can focus on higher value activities. From the point at which they invite a candidate to come in for a face-to-face interview, to building the schedule with the interview team and confirming it with the candidate, it is one seamless process with a consistent user experience.

Make your scheduling smarter. Scheduling is a complex process. There are many players involved and it almost always requires multiple revisions. With Attract it is easy to create a draft schedule with one click, getting suggestions for interview timing according the sequence the hiring manager or recruiter can define.  Free and busy time for all interviewers is displayed in one view that also has the flexibility to modify the schedule,

Change-proof your scheduling. Scheduling almost always has to go through changes and last-minute edits. Attract allows to quickly react to last minute changes when interviewers becoming unavailable. It lets the hiring manager or recruiter swap interviewers and change an individual one to one interview to a panel interview if needed.

Don’t leave your candidates in the dark. Communication is a major challenge for many hiring managers, particularly surfacing information when and where candidates, and interviewers, most need it. Attract allows hiring managers and recruiters to initiate and oversee all communication with candidates and interviewers in one place. No need to switch between multiple tools to communicate with the team and see who has accepted or declined an invitation for an interview.

Let Attract do the heavy lifting so you can focus on the Talent, not the scheduling. Try it out today using our free 60-day trial. And don’t forget to head on over to our community to discuss and also head on over to our Ideas forum to give us your product suggestions.

The post Don’t lose candidates due to a drawn-out interview process appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Hiring the right talent is a tough decision with major consequences. You have to pick a person who will work with your team, ideally for an extended time, on limited information collected over a short period of time. Many tools exist which help build an overall profile of candidates and their soft and hard skills, such as individual interviews, panel interviews, online tests, or assessments. All candidates must complete the same steps in the same sequence to ensure comparable information across candidates and enable you to land a well-informed and unbiased hiring decision. Without a well-structured process bringing all these tools together, your hiring process is subject to incomplete and inconsistent information across your candidate pool and higher likelihood of missing out on your best fit candidate. The process to find the right candidate is different for each industry, organization or even position, making it extremely challenging to get the best results using a one-size-fits-all approach in your hiring process.

Start simple…then tailor hiring to your needs. Microsoft Dynamics for Talent: Attract doesn’t squeeze candidates into one blanket hiring process. Attract starts with a simple basic hiring process to help you get started quickly, paired with additional options to then configure the process for your unique requirements. Let’s explore the basic building blocks of configuring your hiring process.

Set up your hiring process with Stages. Whether your business utilizes a one-step interview process, or a sequence of steps such as initial phone vetting, screening, first round interviews and final interviews, you can fit the hiring process in Attract to your business. Start by creating hiring ‘stages’ aligned to your overall process steps – as many or few as needed – during which specific activities will take place as a candidate advances through the process. Whether your business uses a one-step interview process, or a sequence of steps, once Attract is set up you can be confident that each candidate will be managed through an equal, transparent hiring process from application to offer.

Collect information during the hiring process using Activities. As part of each step of the hiring process, you can define various activities, and their behavior, that need to be performed in order to collect information about your candidates. For example, you may want to require the candidate to complete an online assessment as well as a phone interview as part of a screening stage, or ensure that a background check is performed as part of the offer stage. Whatever is needed, you select the activities and configure the behavior in each stage to ensure you make an educated decision to reject or advance a candidate through your process. Out-of-the-box, Attract provides a growing list of activity types you can pick from and setup to fit your needs.

Add Activities supporting the core candidate process. Every organization is different and requires an individual set of meetings during the hiring process, in addition to the activities with the candidate. You may want to schedule a team meeting to discuss the interview strategy, or a panel meeting to review a candidate’s previous work result as a group. Attract can include those supplemental meetings in your hiring process by adding a ‘schedule activity’ – either as a new stage of the process or within an existing one. A ‘feedback activity’ collects feedback about candidates in a structured way and keeps it all together with the candidate’s other data for easy review by the hiring manager.

Candidate-level transparency. Attract gives a clear picture in the hiring process activity feed of where a candidate is in the process – which stages and activities have been completed so far and what’s next. In addition, you are always able to easily access and review information from a previous stage.

Don’t work around the constraints of your hiring tools, use the configurable hiring process in Attract to tailor hiring to your business process. Try it out today using our free 60-day trial, and don’t forget to head on over to our community to discuss and also head on over to our Ideas forum to give us your product suggestions.

The post Make the right decisions with a flexible hiring process appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.