3 Easy Fixes for your Recruitment Process
According to a survey by Bersin & Associates, more than 50 percent of business leaders considered talent shortage to be a major problem facing their company or industry. This is especially true in competitive fields like technology, where the war for talent continues to rage. By 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates technology hiring will more than double hiring in every other sector.
The only way to win this new battle for the best is to fix the inefficiencies of your current recruitment process. No hiring process is perfect, and some easy fixes might actually be the difference between finding the top candidates and becoming a casualty of the war for talent:
Problem: Employee Turnover
Employee turnover is staggeringly expensive. For employees making $50,000 a year or less, the cost of turnover can set you back a full 20 percent of the employee’s yearly salary. And this number rises in proportion to salary, which is why some costs of a bad hire have been pegged at $50,000 or more.
Meanwhile, more than half of Millennial employees would consider a new job opportunity and 91 percent don’t plan to spend more than three years in their current position. Turnover is clearly a huge problem for organizations.
Fix: Connect Personally Earlier
The best fix is to recruit and hire people with more than just the right skills. You also need to hire people with the right personality, drive, and company culture fit. The key to finding these people is being able to connect personally earlier than you normally can in a traditional recruiting process.
New technology is certainly paving the way here, especially social media. Using social media you can connect, evaluate thought leadership, and get a better feel for a candidate’s potential fit. You can even fill your talent pipeline with smart job seekers, so you’re ready with a deep candidate pool when a position opens.
Problem: Attracting Passive Candidates
Recruiters and hiring managers are obsessed with finding the perfect passive candidate. Like looking for a unicorn or Bigfoot, recruiters can spend their whole careers chasing that perfect, employed candidate only to ultimately turn up empty. Despite the fact most workers are actually open to new job possibilities, passive candidates don’t have a lot of time in their busy schedules to accommodate the rigors of the hiring process.
Fix: Make Scheduling Easier
If scheduling a preliminary (or even an in-depth) interview was easier, more passive candidates would be open to talking to you about great opportunities. This is where, once again, new technology comes into play. Video interviews allow even the busiest candidate to fit the hiring process around his/her own packed calendar.
Passive candidates can record a one-way video interview between meetings or chat with you face-to-face from the comfort of their living room. By freeing up time, video interviews make it easier to actually track down these elusive passive candidates in their natural habitat.
Problem: Finding The Right Fit
Finding a candidate who will fit with ease into your organization is no easy task. In fact, 89 percent of the time people fail in the job due to poor company culture fit.
Having discussed the price of turnover, it’s easy to understand why it’s important to find candidates who fit into the office environment. But poor fit can also have an impact on your overall company culture and even your employee morale. After all, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch.
Fix: Ease Collaboration
Collaboration, between departments or even recruiters and internal teams, is essential to ensuring good fit. It’s important to keep everyone involved and in the loop, which means practicing good communication with everyone who needs to be in the know.
This could vary as greatly as receiving feedback on top of candidate resumes to forwarding along a recorded video interview. It also means getting your current employees in the mix by promoting and developing a robust employee referral program.
The war for talent is still being waged—and you don’t have to fall behind. Just fix some of the most common recruitment problems, and you’ll be tasting victory on the talent battlefield in no time.
What are some common recruitment problems you have? What are some simple fixes you’ve found? Share in the comments!