Why Some Experts Think Your Approach To Hiring Is Flat Out Wrong
Companies like to believe that they have robust hiring processes in place that allow them to capture the right people for the good of their enterprise. But when you dive into the details – as some experts have – you quickly discover that they’ve got it all wrong. And it costs them!
Companies like to believe that they have robust hiring processes in place that allow them to capture the right people for the good of their enterprise. But when you dive into the details – as some experts have – you quickly discover that they’ve got it all wrong. And it costs them!
Your Obsession With Social Media Is Damaging Talent Acquisition
Hiring practices slowly changed throughout the last century to keep pace with the times. Companies introduced a host of new measures to ensure that they received the right candidates for the job. Over time, recruitment became less about what degree you had and more about what you could do during the interview process.
Then along came Facebook, and hiring managers changed their approach yet again. All of a sudden, here was a tool that they could use to pry into the private lives of prospective workers and find out what they were like under the corporate gloss.
A lot of hiring managers felt uncomfortable about practices like these. But with their necks on the line if they made a series of bad hires, you can see why they did it. Social media provided them with the portal that they needed to find low-risk candidates who would work well in their firms.
Hiring managers, therefore, became like a corporate Big Brother, delving into the private details of thousands of people and using them to separate the wheat from the chaff. It wasn’t a good look.
Candidates, however, soon cottoned onto this and began taking down various profile pictures or shuttering their social media accounts entirely. One off-the-cuff comment here or a drunken photo there suddenly became a career killer. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
Hiring managers, therefore, are now very much back to square one and stuck with the old tools. Most, however, don’t realise this yet.
When Facebook and Twitter users found out that hiring managers were using their accounts to assess their suitability, they adapted. Today, the average jobseeker’s social media profile is heavily manicured. It offers tasty breadcrumbs for managers looking to make that next killer hire, but it doesn’t provide genuine insight. Most companies, though, don’t realise that they’re being played. Workers haven’t suddenly stopped drinking or doing stupid things. They have, however, stopped posting about them on the internet – well, those who are smart anyway.
For that reason, companies need to rethink their strategy for hiring. As DSC Personnel points out, it doesn’t have to be difficult, even if you occupy a niche industry.
Focusing On Passive Candidates Harms Retention
There are a lot of so-called “passive” candidates out there on social media – people with the skills that you need but who are not actively looking for work. Hiring these people can hurt your business. Those inside your firm will resent the fact that you’re looking for individuals who are not actively seeking a job with your firm to bolster your ranks. They feel overlooked and unworthy, motivating them to find opportunities elsewhere.
This sort of activity can actually lead to substantial backlash among the very people you need to make your company succeed.
You’re Not Tracking Effective Hires
Sometimes you will make an effective hire that makes a big difference to your operations. Promotions and sourcing temporarily from agencies can help to improve your processes substantially. But even then, many companies are still making mistakes by failing to track the performance of their new colleagues.
When it comes to hiring processes, experts believe that you should track them, as you would anything else in your business. You should be able to arrive at a definite answer for whether one particular way of doing things is better than another. If you can’t, then it suggests that you have a severe problem on your hands. You might think that your hiring process is excellent, but if you don’t track results, then there’s no way of knowing if you’re doing the right thing or not.
Great hiring processes tend to have the following attributes:
They accept that nobody is the finished article
Companies will often publish a wishlist of things that they want from the ideal candidate on a job site. After a week or so, they’ll receive a lot of applications. But over time, they discover that nobody has everything that they want. Firms need to understand that this is just a regular part of doing business. Finding somebody with the right experience and knowledge is almost impossible. Companies need to build the skills that they need in-house.
They understand that they don’t need to hire directly
In today’s marketplace, there are plenty of options for outsourcing the hiring process or using third-party agencies. What’s more, companies are more able than ever before to get the skills that they need on-demand, without necessarily having to sign long-term employment contracts.
They don’t focus on passive candidates
While there might be a lot of people on social media who look like they could be a good match for your company, you are best off not relying on them. Not only are they mostly a mirage, but recruiting these people can create resentment across your organisation.
They track the performance of the people they take on
Without monitoring, you’ll never know whether the person you hired was the right choice or not. Ideally, you want to correlate employee attributes with performance on the job. If you discover that a particular trait leads to higher productivity, then be sure to use this in your evaluations.
You’re Not Prioritising The Candidate Journey
Giving somebody a job isn’t an act of charity. It is something that you’re trying to sell. You want people to work for your firm instead of somebody else’s. A lot of bosses, therefore, are realizing that they need to prioritise the candidate journey. They need to bring people into the fold in a way that gets them pumped about working with the firm. Just plopping them in front of a computer and telling them to get on with it just won’t do in today’s job market. Talented people can always go elsewhere.