Is This The Real Reason Why SMEs In Singapore Are Struggling To Grow?
SMEs owners in Singapore proudly state that their people are their greatest asset. But hardly any of them are they using AI technologies to attract, select and recruit the best talent possible to stay ahead of the competition. It seems they are comfortable in yesterday’s paradigm of business as usual. But are they aware that if they don’t change and upgrade their HR Tech, they will be be sliding faster down the slope that SMEs in Singapore already are on?
THE PROBLEMS
Attempting to find the right talent, for the right job, at the right time is a nightmare.
It’s the same old story. Organisations have a myriad series of intricate problems that need to be solved or opportunities that need to be capitalised upon by talent with the right character, right competencies and hopefully with the right capacity to grow as the organisation’s needs grow.
Unfortunately most job applicants don’t really fit the job from the organisation’s perspective, but yet the problems and the opportunities still exist and jobs need to be filled. So, the wrong people get hired to do a job that is wrong for them, because organisations are using yesterday’s technologies or no technology at all to match people to jobs, and end up making compromises that come back to haunt them later.
THE ISSUES
Hiring strategies are outdated.
Reflect on your experience objectively. Have the majority of organisations you have worked for used objective criteria to fit the right person to the right job based on character, competency and capacity? Or have they gone with what they can get, their biases and gut feel and then regretted them later or treated the fast attrition rate as just the way hiring goes?
The truth is most companies hiring strategy and processes, when it comes to staff recruitment and selection, are simply not conducive towards identifying the right candidate for the right job, at the right time. This leads to an endless amount of time wasted by the human resources department that is not accounted for on any profit and loss statement or balance sheet, but has a direct impact on top and bottom lines in more ways than we can imagine. This is without even factoring in the plight of the poor line managers who are counting on the HR team to source the best talent possible for them.
THE DIFFICULTIES
Hiring and hoping seems to be unavoidable.
Organisations are forced to hire and hope that things work out for the best. I once spoke with an investment banker who was very proud that his entire team had made no investments for the year, in the absence of good investment opportunities.
HR recruitment managers have no such luxury. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that the cost of hiring the wrong candidate is often greater than hiring no one at all, as you have to start all over again when the wrong candidate goes “bye-bye”. This results in time and money being wasted in investing in the wrong person as well as the pain of rehiring and retraining.
If we say people are an organisation’s best asset, then are we also acknowledging the wrong people have to be an organisation’s worst liability?
THE OBSTACLES
Your hiring process is likely to be the boulder you need to get around.
Think about the way most organisations (and most likely yours too) are inviting candidates to apply for jobs. More than 75% are still placing email addresses on job portals and inviting potential candidates to send in their resumes via emails when applying for jobs. This includes the job portals sending you resumes via email.
If not that, the bulk of the remaining job portals are asking candidates to fill in their details on some sort of a basic and generic form and then circulating those details to every potential employer possible. Very few employers are wising up to this practice. Do they not realise circulating the potential employees details to other employers creates unnecessary price competition for them?
It seems the objectives of the job sites and the company that is advertising and seeking quality candidates doesn’t always line up.
THE CHALLENGES
Putting people to the task is not a solution, it’s compounding the problem.
To compound matters, most organisations instead of investing in proper HR Tech do what they have always done towards resolving these systemic shortcomings. They put staff (and head hunters) to the task.
This manpower misallocation, be it internal or external, while it has been going on forever, is not cost smart. Organisations rarely have the luxury of specialised staff with the full spectrum and depth of expertise to resolve the manpower matching issue. And external headhunters can be uncaring mercenaries who don’t always have the organisations’ and candidates’ interests at heart. As a matter of fact, headhunters make more money when the candidates they place leave, as they can make even more money by either place them or replacing them.
It’s an inefficient allocation of resources, no matter which way you look at it. Organisations need a paradigm shift and willingness to change how they have gone about things. Changing entrenched mindsets is possibly the biggest challenge of them all.
THE OPPORTUNITIES
There is a priceless return on investment in employing the right HR tech.
Organisations think they are saving money by not appropriating what they consider to be “expensive” technology. Add to that the truth that many bosses don’t give their HR departments the money they need to help solve the organisation’s attraction, empowerment and growth issues and you’ll realise how much time, money and energy they are wasting by attempting to do things in their archaic manual way.
Think about it.
Even if your organisation is operating in a 3rd world nation, where the cost of labour is cheap, getting humans to do some things makes no sense, especially when technology does it so much better, faster and cheaper as well. History has shown, only smart executives and organisations tend to assess opportunities and costs accurately in the face of what the present and future demand.
If you add up the inefficiencies organisations have to deal with when they forego the use of the latest innovations in HR Tech, you’ll find their behaviour to be counter productive and quite ludicrous.
THE SOLUTIONS
Your organisation needs to use the best HR technologies and start with solving your attraction, selection and recruitment problem first.
Organisations using the right HR technologies negate systemic inefficiencies and gain an advantage over their competitors. For your organisation to function to it’s full potential, you need to make the right hire 7 out of 10 times and not the less than 3 out of 10 times you are likely to be at today.
What a lot of people don’t realise is, the same way organisations have a customer journey across multiple touchpoints, organisations have a talent journey for each talent they hire. The talent journey comprises 3 phases.
- The Attraction, Selection and Recruitment Phase.
- The Monitoring, Engagement and Empowerment Phase.
- The Growth, Development and Leadership phase.
You need to ensure every stage of that talent journey is well managed.
There are an endless number of HR technologies that can help an organisation to optimise their talent journey but very few of them can be found in one place.
Having said that the biggest opportunity for most organisations is also the biggest elephant in the room. And that is, if your Attraction, Selection and Recruitment Phase gets you the wrong people there is very little you can do to change things during the ensuing other 2 phases.
We Can Help You Attract, Select & Recruit The Right Candidate In 5 Easy Steps.
You’ll enjoy the time and cost benefits instantly while zooming in on the perfect candidates.
Step 1
We’ll help you create a domain for your organisation on CusJo.com. e.g. ACME-HR.CusJo.com and give you 3 log ins for the key people in your organisation to access your data.
Step 2
We’ll launch your Job Application Analytics template, and give you the option to Build, Theme, Preview and Publish your Job Applicant methodology to ensure you are asking the right questions of your candidate that match your job, cultural and salary fit, while giving them the option to still upload their cover letter, resumes and other relevant documents as an afterthought. Our AI technology will read through their payslips, cover letters, resumes and other relevant documents and organise them so they make sense to you from hiring perspective.
Here is a sample template so you get a sense of what the applicant fills in. Please note that this will be further customisable based your specific needs. e.g. https://acme-hr.cusjo.com/jobs
Step 3
Once you have set up your system all you need to do is post the QR Codes and URLs the CusJo platform will create for you across all your job sites, social media platforms and even embed into your website, mobile applications and chatbots. This way you will funnel all your job applicants from all sources onto your CusJo domain and job applicant’s resumes will not be scattered all over your inbox.
Step 4
As soon as your job applicants fill in their details you will in real-time be able to access the AI enhanced quantitative and qualitative analytics with filtering capabilities. All you need to do next is to set your job, salary and cultural criteria to zoom in on the perfect candidates for you to invite in for an interview. This can be done within seconds, again and again and again to ensure you are shortlisting them on your terms and not being the victim of the candidate marketing themselves to you through their often trumped up resumes. To give you a sense of the value of this, if you have 100 people applying for a job, you will spend more than 100 hours reading through their resumes and interviewing them to identify the 5–10 candidates you need to shortlist and even then the candidates you shortlist might not be the best fit for your company. CusJo’s AI HR Tech reduces this work down to 1 hour worth of work, to perfectly identify the candidates you absolutely need to shortlist. This 99 hours saved that you can put towards other pressing work that needs to be done.
Step 5
Enjoy your return on investment for as little as SGD 6/- a day, for a 12 months license, that will easily improve your productivity and reduce 80% of your work. To put that in material cost saving terms, that is less than SGD 185/- a month and a fraction of the price you will pay a temporary staff or even an intern on a monthly basis, to handle recruitment and selection for you. Except at this price you will be getting an AI enhanced technology that gives you an edge in hiring the right talent, at the right price, for the right job and with the right fit for your organisation’s culture. It really does not get better than this.
Your Benefits
Our customers tell us as a result of using our AI for HR Tech solutions for Attraction, Selection & Recruitment, they spend:
- 91% less time reading and making sense of resumes.
- 83% less time doing interviews as our job application methodologies also serve a useful function in conducting the first cut of the interviews.
- 77% less time training people after they come into the organisation. This is because they are able to better match candidates with the right character, competencies and capacities to do the job the organisation needs them to.
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The article above was written by Manoj Sharma, the CEO of CusJo.com
When you need human intelligence to be enhanced by AI, CusJo has you covered. Experience the world’s most advanced qualitative and quantitative primary research platform and start enjoying the time and cost saving convenience of CusJo’s AI consensus engine, automated AI reports and QnA sessions at live events too.
To start benefiting from CusJo’s HR Tech Solutions email CusJo at HRTech@CusJo.com
And if you are a SME in Singapore, don’t forget to ask us how you can get a 50% Grant to further double your ROI.
