2. How to evaluate with purpose
‘How to evaluate with purpose’ is the second chapter of Learn, the fifth book of The Hiring Playbooks, 5 ebooks that will turn all your hires into wins. Created by the Homerun team.
This chapter will help you find and address weak points, keep up recruitment trends, make incremental, effective changes, keep up with competitors and maintain organization, focus, and engagement.
It takes a lot of work to make sure your hiring process is constantly
growing and improving. You need to reevaluate it regularly, pinpoint
problems, and make thoughtful changes. But if you do all this, all your
effort will pay off with better hires, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Just keep telling yourself that as you go through all that lovely data.
How do I evaluate my hiring process?
1. Choose evaluation periods
Trying to get your team together for a mundane task like a hiring
process evaluations might be easier said than done. In our experience,
even the most enthusiastic and reliable team players have a nasty
habit of forgetting these meetings. So make your life easier, and your
evaluations more likely to happen, by creating a structured routine and
a timeline that suits your company’s needs and situation.
• If you’re new to hiring, conduct a quick post-mortem immediately
after a new hire is made.
• If you’ve got more experience under your belt, then do a check-in
after three months with each new hire.
Whichever category you fall into, you should conduct at least one
thorough evaluation every year, and one lightweight evaluation every
six months, to make sure you’re on top of your hiring game. We strongly
suggest scheduling these evaluations at times when business is at its
slowest so that it’s easier for your teammates to clear their schedules
to participate.
Willem van Roosmalen, co-founder Homerun:
“You put so much time and energy into the hiring process — and you will for every future opening too- so you shouldn’t pass up a chance to learn from what you’ve done to improve it in the long term. The more you evaluate, the better and more efficient your hiring process will be.”
2. Check top priority benchmarks
You don’t need to measure everything to get a clear understanding of
how your hiring efforts are going. Too many data points can bog you
down and get in the way of taking action. So cut to the chase and focus
on top priority benchmarks. Quality, speed, cost, and conversion are the
most useful in determining your recruitment process ROI.
You can find a list of the valuable data points to monitor for these
recruitment benchmarks in our previous article, How to use benchmarks.
For each benchmark category (quality, speed, cost, and conversion)
ask:
• Are you hitting the majority of your targets overall?
• Are you hitting your specific targets?
• Then look at your overall results and ask yourself:
• Where are you falling down?
• Where are you excelling?
If you’ve conducted a similar review before, compare your current
results with your previous results to see if and where you’re improving.
If you haven’t, then check them against the goals you’ve set for
yourself, or against industry standards.
Finally, assess your results to discover the areas that need
improvement, then connect each of them to specific points in your
hiring process that you can improve upon.
3. Check your online reputation
Like it or not, people are talking about you online, so you might as well
as find out what they’re saying. Check Glassdoor, Vault, CareerLeak,
and any equivalent sites for your location/industry to keep tabs on
your employer brand reputation. If your reviews are less than stellar,
then Inc. has some excellent tips for dealing with negative Glassdoor
reviews.
4. Gather feedback from hires and applicants
Use the insights that you’ve gained from analyzing your benchmarks
and investigating your online reputation to build employee and
applicant surveys. Construct surveys that specifically address the areas that you’re struggling with and ask targeted questions that will help you learn more about where you’re going wrong and how you can improve.
If you want any tips, then we’ve got lots here on how to create targeted,
actionable employee surveys.
5. Gather feedback from hiring team(s) and colleagues
Get a more diverse perspective on your hiring process by speaking
with your hiring team(s). Their feedback will help you see things from a
new angle, uncover problems hidden in your blind spots, and find fresh
solutions.
For example, to understand candidate quality, speak directly to
the people who are best equipped to evaluate it. Talk to the people
responsible for managing employee output (if your work in a flat
hierarchy, then ask one of your peers) and ask them point blank:
“Would you hire this person again?”.
If the answer is no, then we’re afraid that you’ve got a bad hire on your
hands. Delve deeper to get a better understanding of their response
and get to the root of the problem. Is it a lack of culture fit? Is the
person under-qualified? Does he or she have a poor work ethic? The
answers to these questions will help you identify changes that you
can make when attracting, qualifying, and selecting candidates in the
future.
What do I do next?
Pour over the results of your evaluation, identify all of your pain points,
and brainstorm actionable solutions that you can make to improve your
hiring process. The next article, Improve your hiring strategy, is a great
place to start.
All Images by Studio Spass.
