Terrible Recruiting Strategy
Companies have never hired that many talents and they even have never paid that much money on hiring. $4,129 on average.
And it has never been such a wrong job!
If you’re hoping to be the next one-in-every-century brains who supervises the wisest and most creative teams of all time, then you should focus on hiring the best-fit candidates. Now, as intriguing as it sounds, you need to put a hold on your urges and push your recruiting staff into performance-based hiring.
Hiring talents is the top CEO’s challenges in human capital management in the most recent Conference Board Annual Survey and a top concern according to PwC’s 2020 CEO survey reports that three-quarters of CEOs said they were concerned about whether they would have the talent they needed. Their worry was around how that would constrain growth.
A Census data by HBR shows that the majority of talents who hopped on the new job in 2018 were not even searching for one! Recruiters and hiring managers obsessively pile up resumes in their recruiting pipeline believing this is a total number game.
93% of companies using LinkedIn mostly stalking candidate’s profiles to source candidates. while only 18% of candidates are daily on LinkedIn and spend time mostly on other social media platforms. Employers nowadays advertise non-existing positions requesting active candidates to submit their profiles/resumes.
Companies mostly outsourced a part of sourcing and recruitment to agencies and subcontractors — about 40% according to research by Korn Ferry, agencies and recruiters mostly use blind algorithms that are working based on keywords.
On the other side of the story, candidates are getting smarter than software and include job description keywords into their resumes to pass the shortlisting.
Knowing this, what would be the benefits of putting faith in the final numbers of a recruiter? Will you be a fallen victim to an employee’s pure outcome and regret your decisions, or will it be the other way around?
What are the reasons behind such a poor performance?
Companies are getting picky. Giving a false value into resumes over the attitude and the passion.
Candidates are complaining about the long, time taking and difficult selection process. Asking time taking assignments to be delivered alongside reasoning psychometric and knowledge assessments looking for contradictions and red flag while recruiters grilling candidates for an employment gap.
Recruiters like Brigette are becoming a rare breed these days.
“I have learned over the years if you want the best talent, stop looking for perfection. It does not exist! Resumes don’t perform jobs. it’s people — so hire people and not resumes.”
Being on both sides of the interview process gave me a different perspective. Life happens. Once you have the skills and right attitude for the job, that’s my main focus. Someone took a chance on me and I am going to take a chance on you”
Brigette Hyacinth
Companies are hiring more than ever, but a reason behind such massive recruitment is a significant decline in the retention of talents. LinkedIn data demonstrate career advancement is the most common reason employees consider a change — which is surely related to employers’ not promoting to fill vacancies.
“They waste time and generate stress on both sides. Almost everyone, if pressed, will admit this. And yet they persist.”
Jon Evans
The Fallout
Numerous factors are affecting hiring processes in a business atmosphere. And, as you might have guessed by now, most of them can harm the business. Let’s take a look at some of them here:
The selection processes are broken. Hiring resumes are simply wrong while having long rounds of interviews, assessments, whiteboard interviews, and assignments are a bad way for companies to evaluate candidates. Surprisingly, most companies do not measure the success rate of their processes.
In interviews, you are face-to-face with somebody who has passed every particle you’ve laid in his path to acceptance. They have come out of your startup’s screening procedures heads high and now are ready to win you away in person. Studies show that quite a large number of managers fall victim to their emotions in the physical session and get enticed by what applicants bring forth to the table. After a certain point, leaders think that they have the one-and-only employee in their reach, and they just need to stretch out to convince them to join their team. They stop listening and immediately start negotiating to lock down the candidate and get them onboard. At this moment, leaders and managers have lost it all and ultimately give in to the interview’s vibe.
Recruiting the wrong candidate sets you back ages and costs you a lot. At this point, you would have two options:
- Just go with it and swallow your frustration until the time is right to set up other new interviews and hire the right applicant.
- Fire the wrongfully-acquired employee, which will have a catastrophic impact on your company. You have to immediately set up the screening and selection process again, which will cost you a lot, and spend a couple of working days choosing the best-fit.
Either way, there’s no silver lining for you. You will suffer until you get the right guy in the position and finally focusing on growing.
Don’t panic. I have a better alternative. Read on.
Alternative?
Imagine the Profile of the Ideal Applicant
Discover all the parts of an open position. What are your company values? What are the department missions? where the new talent is going to function? What are his/her tasks? Describe the job’s accountability, influence, and support. Who will they report to?
Knowing why someone new is required, helps understand the expectations of the position as well as the short and long-term objectives, and this will make the procedure more structured.
That will let you understand exactly what to look for during interviews and what evaluation criteria are required at the recruitment and employment process.
To find the best applicant for the job, you need to ascertain what the best applicant should look like. Build a mental profile of this person and consider what educational background they must have, what their experience should be, the skills that are needed, as well as those that are merely desired.
Figure out What Your Company Can Offer
Understanding this fact that a happy employee is a productive one causes employees to gain more benefits. Prosperous firms offer perks, benefits, and company cultures that are envied, and, as such, to determine which applicants you can target, it’s important to know what the organization can offer in return.
Consider internal hiring
Provide the promotion and career advances for your talents by posting open positions and establish a transparent hiring process, criteria, and freedom of application for anyone who wishes to give a chance.
Gathering, analyzing, and sharing information on the high-quality internal candidates won’t be possible if a proper functional database of acquisitions isn’t around. Coming up with a database of applicants was nothing to joke about back in the olden days of internal hiring.
Recruiting personnel can now scroll through the database in search of a particular applicant or resume in a matter of few minutes and save up on much time. Besides being timesaving, hiring parties will have an unbelievably more natural time recognizing the best fits and recruiting them.
Consider community and social recruiting
To reach the best fit in your local area, you need to build a community of affiliates from your employees or networks and followers to refer the right one to you.
Data shows people around you are two times better at assessing a job for you than yourself.
By building a community to affiliate and hunt proper candidates you will form a long-term and low-cost sourcing channel around yourself while positively empower your employer branding.
It shouldn’t be a shock that with a new generation full-heartedly bent on spending countless hours on social media, a vast portion of recruiters and highly skilled applicants use some job-advertising platform to gain more visibility and hints on what opportunities are available. While LinkedIn mainly focuses on job-related transactions, many recruiters tend to hurdle other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This way, they can hit the potential candidates where they are more active and less official.
Spend time and learn how to employ social media recruiting strategies. These strategies, which are a crucial part of recruiting automation, will have a greater effect if posed as social media posts and online recruiting campaign, which usually builds up a buzz for your brand management.
Redesign about your selection process
Set an automated workflow of smart, combined, and short psychometric assessments and machined-led interviews to warm up candidates for the coming round of interviews.
We humbly suggest redesigning your knowledge assessments. Companies became so picky so they design long and complex test projects to assess skills and knowledge, but it directly leads to a high number of candidate dropouts due to the requirement of so much time, attention, and indeed unscalable for a candidate.
Most engineers have their own side projects and that is a new norm. Invite them to open one of their noble works.
Start the interview by transparently discuss your evaluation criteria and selection process.
Ask for a brief of the side project at speed. Normally a 30 min talk would be enough.
Map the project features, customer needs, and strategies with the candidate and start asking the logic behind each.
After you become familiar with the project we suggest going through a feature development process together. Map the feature requirement, user stories and watch the candidate skills on adding the feature into the project. This way you have the opportunity to examine the candidate in the real-world while the candidate will comfortably add up the new possibilities to his/her project.
