3 Hiring Headaches: Too Many, Too Few, and Poor Quality
The number of applicants, determining a cultural fit, and the balancing act of speed and agility in the hiring process are the top three hiring pains for every HR department. However, you can alleviate these ailments with a little planning and the right tools!
1. Too Many Applicants
Attracting and acquiring lots of applicants can be a challenge, especially for growing businesses or large companies. The issue is that growing businesses don’t always have the time or resources to effectively read through resumes, and this can create multiple bottlenecks in the hiring process, resulting in a poor candidate experience.
If the hiring process is too long or complicated, causing you to lose candidates, then you need to look into implementing a robust applicant tracking system, particularly one that separates the hiring process into stages, keeps candidate data handy and searchable, and tracks stages of recruitment.
When considering an ATS, it is imperative to assess your organizational needs in terms of integration and ease of use on both sides of the recruitment equation. A well-rounded ATS will post job openings to the company career page, allowing candidates to apply on your site. Why is this so important? Seventy-six percent of candidates prefer to apply through a career site . So it stands to reason that your ATS must be user-friendly for not only the recruitment team, but the candidates who use the career page as well.
2. Assessing Soft Skills
With all of the chatter about selecting candidates for soft skills, you don’t want to misunderstand the trend. Hiring managers haven’t forgotten about the essential hard skills. The primary concern for assessing soft skills is in addition to evaluating a candidate’s training and experience. Evaluating a candidate’s fit for a position can’t be solely based on their hard skills; rather, there has to be a balance between functional and cultural fit. HR pro John Myrna says: “Hire based on aptitude, i.e.[,] having enough grey matter to master the skills, and attitude, i.e.[,] the passion and commitment to put in the time to master the skills.”
Use candidate resumes and samples of work to evaluate functional fit. Hard skills are easily assessed through hard copy. Soft skills, on the other hand, are best assessed through the face-to-face time during the interview process. Employers need to merge soft and hard skills in the middle. To call them “medium skills” would make our teams sound mediocre, but that middle ground is exactly what we need. Being able to assess soft skills can help recruiting teams get out of the land of too few applicants and into the far more fertile — and efficient — ground of smart, trainable employees.
3. Balancing Quality and Quantity
Effective recruiting is a delicate balancing act. There has to be a strategic equilibrium between quality and quantity. As tempting as it might be to rush through all of the resumes cluttering your desk, doing so removes quality from the equation. Candidate experience has a direct impact on the success of future recruitment efforts. Enough poor candidate experiences will result in a dip in the number of job applicants you encounter.
Keep the scales level with a healthy balance between the quality of candidate experience and the quantity of candidates you evaluate. Use an ATS to filter resumes to improve the quantity of candidates and add a personal touch during the hiring process to create a quality experience. Because of the human connection, 90 percent of candidates who are respected during the interview leave with a positive experience, regardless of whether or not they are offered the job.
Candidate experience is the way to go when it comes to addressing a cycle of poor quality applicants. Take a long, hard look at the way you’re treating the employees and applicants you do have. Compensation models out of whack? Frustrating application process that leaves top talent waiting for a month? Fix those things immediately!
The hiring process is a balancing act. HR professionals have to balance the assessment of hard and soft skills; the quality of candidate experience and the quantity of candidates; and the organizational needs an ATS must meet.
Finding the right ATS can be the first stepping stone to alleviating these three ailments. Seamlessly assessing candidate resumes and filtering them based on hard skills represented in their resumes eliminates some of the pain. Subsequently, this allows recruiters to focus more on the quality of candidate experience, rather than just candidate data. Eliminate hiring headaches by addressing the areas where your process needs a little tightening.