More than 60% of hiring experts said finding qualified and experienced candidates was a big challenge for their department, based on Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report. Pinpointing full-time applicants with the right skills was another concern, according to 37% of recruitment professionals. Spotting qualified entry-level employees was third, with 34% of HR experts agreeing.
Indeed, it’s difficult to find quality hires, whether you’re looking for experienced workers for management positions or fresh grads for entry-level ones. If you find that your new hires’ productivity scores are tanking or your turnover rate continues to rise, it may be time to improve your process to get better-quality recruits. Get started with the following suggestions:
Measure Your Quality of Hire
The factors that make up the quality of hire are different from business to business. You can use their job performance, engagement, or even cultural fit scores for this. Add all these values up. Then, divide them by the number of indicators you used. You’ll end up with a number from one to 100 that represents your quality of hire.
Measure this for each of your new hires. If their average score is in the 70s or lower, you may have a significant problem in your process. And if it’s in the 80s or higher, there’s always room for improvement!
Know Who You Want
It’s stressful to wade through waves of applications from unqualified candidates. It’s even more stressful to find out that the person you did hire wasn’t a good fit for the job. You can minimize this mistake by figuring out a candidate persona for the roles you post.
Find out which employees are excelling in the roles you’re looking for and check out their resumés and performance reviews for trends in their demographic info, education and employment history, characteristics, career goals, skills, and more. Use these attributes as a guide when scanning through resumés or interviewing applicants.
Be Where Your Candidates Are
General job posting pages like Jobstreet, Kalibrr, Indeed, Glassdoor, and more are great avenues for hiring because of their massive user bases. However, you may have better luck looking for candidates in specialized job sites. One great example is Stack Overflow. It’s a very popular question and answer site for IT and web development professionals. It opened up a job portal recently where you can find qualified computer experts. These sites have your ideal candidates scanning their boards every day. All you need to do is reel them in with your job listings.
Gauge Their Skills
Along with integrity assessment exams, you should provide them with tests customized for their role. For example, if you’re looking for a sales expert, HR experts from Workable recommend assessing their communication, presentation, goal-setting, and research skills. Have them finish quick tasks like writing email sales letters, solving sales quota problems, and presenting elevator pitches. This way, you and the managers will get a glimpse of how the applicant will perform in the field.
It truly is an employee’s market. There are more jobs than workers. As such, it’s often difficult to bag the good ones. Putting in the effort to create a candidate persona, posting listings on niche job sites, and providing customized exams may help you sift through your pool of applicants to find the best among the bunch. While these practices may slow your process down a bit, they’re worth implementing if it means seeing your quality-of-hire values trend upwards.