By Greg Muller, Founder & CEO at Gooroo
According to the Harvard Business Review, 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions and 45% of bad hires are attributed to poor screening processes . Put the statistics aside though because if you’ve ever worked alongside a colleague who could be considered a ‘bad hire’ you will know first-hand the detrimental effect it can have on an organisation.
With so much discussion around a skills shortage in Australia, it’s no wonder businesses feel under pressure to get recruitment right. There seems to be an attitude that it’s better to find someone quickly and get the role filled than to do due diligence to ensure a candidate is the right fit for your business. To expedite the recruitment process, increasingly businesses are treating people as commodities and tackling the talent problem with plughole solutions, such as using ‘round robin’ style interviews to churn through more candidates.
However, despite these changing styles, companies are not reviewing the underlying way they assess people so their recruitment problems remain the same. To buck this trend, businesses need to get smarter about how they approach new hires.
Potential outweighs experience
It’s common for potential employees to be approached on
LinkedIn for skills featured half way down their CV and that they haven’t used for several years. People want new challenges, not a repeat of their old job.
This is where technology can help you to map related skills to ones they may have used in the past. You can use technology to match candidates that have a related skill (or skills) and the potential to learn new ones, which ensures you’re not missing out on top talent who may have been excluded through a pure skills-matching approach.
In addition, several candidates may have the ‘correct’ experience for the role you’re recruiting. In which case, how do you differentiate between them to determine who is the best fit for your business? Businesses need to start considering not whether its employees have the right skills, but whether they have the capability and mindset to learn new ones.
Eliminate unconscious bias
Although we might explicitly believe that prejudice and discrimination are wrong, research is proving we are all unconsciously biased towards the world around us and use stereotypes every day. These biases can influence our decision making and are often caused by our brain making quick judgments of people based on our background and personal experiences, rather than on all the relevant information. When unconscious bias is present in the recruitment process, talented people can be left out of your workforce or overlooked for development and career progression. To overcome unconscious bias, consider tools such as anonymous screening when hiring for new roles. By taking the human element out of the first stage of assessment, businesses ensure that the crop of candidates presented for consideration are chosen solely on their merits.
Think about long-term success
We regularly see businesses very focused on their immediate hiring needs and not looking at how candidates can help to move their business forward. They are excluding candidates from their hiring pool based on education and experience without considering what’s best for their company in the long term. When considering a new employee, companies need to know how people will engage with the team and the work, not just whether they have the skills they need to do it. Having experience in a task is not necessarily a determinant of future performance. It only represents one dimension.
One of the key drivers of expertise is belief. When an individual believes in themselves, they participate more, the experiences build and most importantly, an individual becomes more energised and engagement grows. It is key to understand the factors that help drive an individual’s belief and engagement in their role.
Negotiate fair
Once you have found the best candidate, the hiring process can come unstuck during the negotiation period due to unrealistic expectations from one side or the other. Part of this problem stems from out-of-date salary data. Where possible, you should access a tool such as Gooroo to determine what a candidate is currently worth and the demand for a particular role to ensure a better understanding of the salary before entering negotiations.
Businesses are undoubtedly facing challenges during the recruitment process and now more than ever, they need to be smarter about using the tools at their disposal to ensure efficiency and effectiveness as well as setting themselves up for growth.
