A company will strategically plan and invest in product development, marketing, sales and technology to be strongly positioned in the market and beat out competition. Yet, most companies don’t apply the same dedication and foresight when hiring the workforce that will drive these elements to success. However, talent managers can achieve significant savings by taking a close look at the strategy and analytics for an existing recruiting program.
The Team
Internal recruitment teams typically are staffed with fixed resources to deliver services, and the resources often have distinct experience and skills not easily interchanged. Thus, recruitment departments tend not to adjust easily to market changes. Contract recruiters can provide flexibility in work hours and skill sets, but the on-boarding process and time to productivity related to systems and process training, absorbing the culture, and building internal relationships may drain internal resources and limit the overall return on investment.
Typically, once contractors conclude an engagement, they move to the next assignment. Time spent training them is not transferable and will need to be repeated during the next hiring period, on a new resource, during a company’s next growth cycle.
In a recruiting environment with specialized domain expertise, the recruitment team’s skills need to adjust as organizational changes occur. For example, shifting focus from engineering and product development to sales, marketing and customer support requires alterations to the strategy and a varied set of skills to handle the recruitment effort.
Annual business fluctuations can cause periods of high demand that the team cannot meet without outside recruitment agency assistance, which increases the cost of a new hire. Conversely, during down cycles or periods of reduced effort, the team is overstaffed and probably overextended in its financial commitments to various recruitment tools, job boards and advertising. Consider a model using contractors, or recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).
The Process
Unequivocally, a major area of waste and lost recruitment opportunity can be tracked to a lack of process. Actually, it usually cannot be tracked at all, which is the root of the problem. For example, you have an urgent need for a marketing coordinator. A hundred applicants submit resumes for the job. Resumes are delivered to the hiring manager, who vets the top two dozen or so. The director of marketing takes the resumes home that night, reviews them throughout the week and contacts the top eight to 10 candidates for an initial phone conversation. She then chooses five that seem qualified for a formal interview and sets up times for them to meet the team.
HR may step in to inform candidates of their interviews, while the marketing director runs the interview process. Considering the myriad responsibilities that fall on a marketing director, it is unlikely she is taking all the right steps to ensure interviews are done in a consistent, fair, effective and productive manner.
Instead, resumes likely are distributed to people who will take part in candidate assessment prior to the live interviews. Each person views the resumes, often guessing what the candidate will be responsible for if hired, but that person probably is not certain what he or she should be asking.
Maybe one was told to screen for presentation skills. Another was tasked with finding out why the candidate wants to leave his or her current situation. But otherwise, there isn’t much guidance for marketing team members who are probably not well-versed in the intricacies of effective interviewing. So they not only lose time away from daily work responsibilities, they may duplicate efforts, use poor judgment and alienate candidates.
Imagine not defining product requirements or expecting a sales team to work without a targeted sales plan. This often happens when there is no well-defined plan for recruiting. Most companies feel they have a recruiting strategy. They predict expected number of hires annually, determine compensation levels, how much attrition to expect and establish a recruitment budget for advertising and agencies. But the key to the castle is missing: process.
Without a systematically executed process, it is impossible to recruit at the most efficient levels. Examine current operations to see where small improvements and enhanced documentation can help cut recruiting waste. For instance, the interview process is a candidate’s first view into an organization. It requires definition — not just a basic overview, but defined roles and responsibilities at each stage to ensure successful execution.
The current employment market has produced more active candidates than ever before. Some seeking employment are qualified; others may be completely off-target. Talent managers need a system to cull resumes and ensure the best talent is not overlooked. This system must be efficient, as managers cannot afford to spend a lot of time on this process. Therefore:
* Establish standards to review each batch of new resumes.
* Provide staff members with a standard process to review resumes.
* Ensure staffers know what to look for, how to identify flags and where to document questions, concerns and notes so interview team participants can follow up on those items.
* Establish standards to input data into the ATS or other system to log and track candidate info. This ensures the team executes this step correctly and can save countless hours and money as the organization grows.
* Make certain the company is in compliance with all EEOC guidelines, which will save time and potential costs in the future.
Interview Effectiveness
To conduct an effective interview process that has high impact and continuously produces the best candidates, make certain each member of the interview team is used appropriately.
* Create an interview plan. It should include timelines, interview teams and a mission for each stage. Plans vary by organization. Some have a time-intensive and/or multistage process. Other companies need to complete interviews in one day. Define the plan in advance and stick to it. This helps set candidate and interview team expectations.
* Assemble the interview team. Determine who will be included and at what stage they will be brought into the interview process. Outline responsibilities for each interviewer. If possible, meet with the interview team as a group. Provide direction on the purpose for each meeting to increase awareness of the importance of the process being established.
* Discuss interview roles and responsibilities. Review sample questions and ensure each participant handles something unique so as not to duplicate efforts. Confirm each participant is comfortable with his or her mission and knows how to execute. To replicate the process for future use, generate an interview guide to which participants can refer.
* Communicate. Don’t let the team’s valuable information and feedback go uncollected once interviews are completed and everyone is back on the job. Follow through with the process and analyze interview results to facilitate the next great hire.
Impactful Assessment
Inaccurate candidate assessment and ineffective communication of feedback among interview team members can eliminate a candidate for the wrong reasons. Each time a candidate enters the process and is not hired, the organization has lost approximately three and a half hours of productivity. Multiply this by the number of candidates interviewed each year, and it is staggering.
An element of comparison is necessary to get to the best candidates. However, ensuring agreement on overall expectations for a candidate to be hired — skills, experience, cultural fit, work style — is crucial. Talent managers must map out exactly what is necessary and reach consensus among all active participants. Consider:
* How will each candidate be assessed? Determine when to invite various interviewers into the process. What will flow best to generate candidate intrigue and gather the necessary hiring information?
* The feedback process needs to be documented and understood by all. How will feedback be collected? Does every participant have an equal say? Every interviewer should have a weighted score based on the importance of the information they gather from the candidate. Set benchmarks so all interview participants are working from the same scoring system, ensuring each candidate is given an equal opportunity. Structure a feedback process to ensure candidates are not cut because of one participant’s thoughts, concerns or “gut feelings.”
* People tend to gravitate toward candidates that remind them of themselves. This practice can lead to groupthink and a lack of diversity in ideas, solutions and representation. Candidate assessments can help to uncover potentially unseen behavioral patterns that could clash with a team or organization.
Outsourcing
Today’s market requires a recruitment strategy built to adjust to changing economic challenges. Recruitment programs require flexibility and the ability to scale quickly based on organizational changes. Those participating in the process require guidance and training to ensure successful plan execution. Recruitment teams also need to alter work patterns based on staffing demands.
When tracking recruitment waste, it is not necessarily the loss in actual dollars that is most damaging but rather the lost opportunity to hire the best candidates for the organization. Recruitment partners should understand an organization’s challenges and present solutions to meet those needs. Recruitment outsourcing can build internal effectiveness, as a partner can adjust to an organization’s changing needs over time.
Recruiting is strategic. Hiring the right people to drive an organization is critical. Planning and developing well-defined processes will not only eliminate waste and increase productivity, it will create a recruiting machine that will help take an organization to the next level.
The Team
Internal recruitment teams typically are staffed with fixed resources to deliver services, and the resources often have distinct experience and skills not easily interchanged. Thus, recruitment departments tend not to adjust easily to market changes. Contract recruiters can provide flexibility in work hours and skill sets, but the on-boarding process and time to productivity related to systems and process training, absorbing the culture, and building internal relationships may drain internal resources and limit the overall return on investment.
Typically, once contractors conclude an engagement, they move to the next assignment. Time spent training them is not transferable and will need to be repeated during the next hiring period, on a new resource, during a company’s next growth cycle.
In a recruiting environment with specialized domain expertise, the recruitment team’s skills need to adjust as organizational changes occur. For example, shifting focus from engineering and product development to sales, marketing and customer support requires alterations to the strategy and a varied set of skills to handle the recruitment effort.
Annual business fluctuations can cause periods of high demand that the team cannot meet without outside recruitment agency assistance, which increases the cost of a new hire. Conversely, during down cycles or periods of reduced effort, the team is overstaffed and probably overextended in its financial commitments to various recruitment tools, job boards and advertising. Consider a model using contractors, or recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).
The Process
Unequivocally, a major area of waste and lost recruitment opportunity can be tracked to a lack of process. Actually, it usually cannot be tracked at all, which is the root of the problem. For example, you have an urgent need for a marketing coordinator. A hundred applicants submit resumes for the job. Resumes are delivered to the hiring manager, who vets the top two dozen or so. The director of marketing takes the resumes home that night, reviews them throughout the week and contacts the top eight to 10 candidates for an initial phone conversation. She then chooses five that seem qualified for a formal interview and sets up times for them to meet the team.
HR may step in to inform candidates of their interviews, while the marketing director runs the interview process. Considering the myriad responsibilities that fall on a marketing director, it is unlikely she is taking all the right steps to ensure interviews are done in a consistent, fair, effective and productive manner.
Instead, resumes likely are distributed to people who will take part in candidate assessment prior to the live interviews. Each person views the resumes, often guessing what the candidate will be responsible for if hired, but that person probably is not certain what he or she should be asking.
Maybe one was told to screen for presentation skills. Another was tasked with finding out why the candidate wants to leave his or her current situation. But otherwise, there isn’t much guidance for marketing team members who are probably not well-versed in the intricacies of effective interviewing. So they not only lose time away from daily work responsibilities, they may duplicate efforts, use poor judgment and alienate candidates.
Imagine not defining product requirements or expecting a sales team to work without a targeted sales plan. This often happens when there is no well-defined plan for recruiting. Most companies feel they have a recruiting strategy. They predict expected number of hires annually, determine compensation levels, how much attrition to expect and establish a recruitment budget for advertising and agencies. But the key to the castle is missing: process.
Without a systematically executed process, it is impossible to recruit at the most efficient levels. Examine current operations to see where small improvements and enhanced documentation can help cut recruiting waste. For instance, the interview process is a candidate’s first view into an organization. It requires definition — not just a basic overview, but defined roles and responsibilities at each stage to ensure successful execution.
The current employment market has produced more active candidates than ever before. Some seeking employment are qualified; others may be completely off-target. Talent managers need a system to cull resumes and ensure the best talent is not overlooked. This system must be efficient, as managers cannot afford to spend a lot of time on this process. Therefore:
* Establish standards to review each batch of new resumes.
* Provide staff members with a standard process to review resumes.
* Ensure staffers know what to look for, how to identify flags and where to document questions, concerns and notes so interview team participants can follow up on those items.
* Establish standards to input data into the ATS or other system to log and track candidate info. This ensures the team executes this step correctly and can save countless hours and money as the organization grows.
* Make certain the company is in compliance with all EEOC guidelines, which will save time and potential costs in the future.
Interview Effectiveness
To conduct an effective interview process that has high impact and continuously produces the best candidates, make certain each member of the interview team is used appropriately.
* Create an interview plan. It should include timelines, interview teams and a mission for each stage. Plans vary by organization. Some have a time-intensive and/or multistage process. Other companies need to complete interviews in one day. Define the plan in advance and stick to it. This helps set candidate and interview team expectations.
* Assemble the interview team. Determine who will be included and at what stage they will be brought into the interview process. Outline responsibilities for each interviewer. If possible, meet with the interview team as a group. Provide direction on the purpose for each meeting to increase awareness of the importance of the process being established.
* Discuss interview roles and responsibilities. Review sample questions and ensure each participant handles something unique so as not to duplicate efforts. Confirm each participant is comfortable with his or her mission and knows how to execute. To replicate the process for future use, generate an interview guide to which participants can refer.
* Communicate. Don’t let the team’s valuable information and feedback go uncollected once interviews are completed and everyone is back on the job. Follow through with the process and analyze interview results to facilitate the next great hire.
Impactful Assessment
Inaccurate candidate assessment and ineffective communication of feedback among interview team members can eliminate a candidate for the wrong reasons. Each time a candidate enters the process and is not hired, the organization has lost approximately three and a half hours of productivity. Multiply this by the number of candidates interviewed each year, and it is staggering.
An element of comparison is necessary to get to the best candidates. However, ensuring agreement on overall expectations for a candidate to be hired — skills, experience, cultural fit, work style — is crucial. Talent managers must map out exactly what is necessary and reach consensus among all active participants. Consider:
* How will each candidate be assessed? Determine when to invite various interviewers into the process. What will flow best to generate candidate intrigue and gather the necessary hiring information?
* The feedback process needs to be documented and understood by all. How will feedback be collected? Does every participant have an equal say? Every interviewer should have a weighted score based on the importance of the information they gather from the candidate. Set benchmarks so all interview participants are working from the same scoring system, ensuring each candidate is given an equal opportunity. Structure a feedback process to ensure candidates are not cut because of one participant’s thoughts, concerns or “gut feelings.”
* People tend to gravitate toward candidates that remind them of themselves. This practice can lead to groupthink and a lack of diversity in ideas, solutions and representation. Candidate assessments can help to uncover potentially unseen behavioral patterns that could clash with a team or organization.
Outsourcing
Today’s market requires a recruitment strategy built to adjust to changing economic challenges. Recruitment programs require flexibility and the ability to scale quickly based on organizational changes. Those participating in the process require guidance and training to ensure successful plan execution. Recruitment teams also need to alter work patterns based on staffing demands.
When tracking recruitment waste, it is not necessarily the loss in actual dollars that is most damaging but rather the lost opportunity to hire the best candidates for the organization. Recruitment partners should understand an organization’s challenges and present solutions to meet those needs. Recruitment outsourcing can build internal effectiveness, as a partner can adjust to an organization’s changing needs over time.
Recruiting is strategic. Hiring the right people to drive an organization is critical. Planning and developing well-defined processes will not only eliminate waste and increase productivity, it will create a recruiting machine that will help take an organization to the next level.
