Is your recruiting process falling flat lately? Is the applicant process long, confusing, or resulting in lackluster hires? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then it might be time to reevaluate your recruiting strategy.
When it comes to finding talent, hiring managers often stick to a specific routine to fill job vacancies. But, with 30% of new employees leaving their jobs within the first 90 days of getting hired, these steps may need some fine-tuning.
Sure, employees may leave for a variety of reasons, but there are ways HR professionals improve their levels of hiring success. After all, employee turnover doesn’t benefit either party—and may harm your company’s credibility and brand in the process.
Here are a few key factors to look for when trying to recharge your recruiting efforts.
Gather Job Applicant Feedback
The first step to building an effective recruiting process may be as simple as putting an ear to the ground.
This is as easy as making a point to talk to new hires. Find out what part was the most difficult and what part was the easiest about the process. Looking at the process as a whole and finding the steps that can be eliminated. For example, if your process still requires 10-key assessments, it may be out of date and need to be revised.
If you want the full scope; check online reviews. The tellings of interviews past are incredibly eye opening: Too slow in responding to applications. A company didn’t give enough feedback about why the person didn’t get the job. Interviewers asked questions that weren’t stimulating or didn’t pay attention to the answers. Even down to the hiring manager not turning their phone off in an interview after asking his team to. The results can be quite telling.
Rewrite Your Job Descriptions
One of the top reasons people leave a company is because the work wasn’t what they expected it to be. While sometimes this can be an onboarding or training issue, it often begins with the job description.
It may begin with a quick assessment of the job description for anything that could deter diverse talent from applying, such as length, requirements, and word choice. Taking it one step further, you can evaluate distribution models of the job description and past outcomes per channel. To find out how past hires have performed, recruiters should reach out to clients to gauge the effectiveness of their past recruiting efforts.
Use Quality, Speed, and Cost Metrics
There are three core pillars hiring managers can use to evaluate the recruiting process: quality, speed, and cost.
While the weight of each of these will differ by company, using qualitative measures can give a comprehensive insight into any recruiting process regardless of complexity, volume, or scale. The typical consideration for quality in recruiting is quality of hire, i.e. how many new hires remain in the organization after 90 days.
The top line metric is the ratio of the number of candidates presented compared to the number of candidates hired. If you need to triage where your recruiting process isn’t working as well, you can look at the following:
# of candidates presented vs. # of candidates interviewed
# of candidates interviewed vs. # candidates offered
# candidates offered vs. # of candidates hired
After reviewing this quality metric, it’s beneficial to compare the numbers to see how long it takes to actually fill a position by looking at the number of days from when the position is approved to when an offer is accepted. You’ll also want to note how much it costs the company to do so.
The fundamental consideration when evaluating the cost of the recruiting process is the cost per hire, which is found in the details. Hiring managers should ask the following questions:
What costs are included in the recruiting process?
Is the cost per hire different if the end result is an internal vs. external hire?
Should cost per hire be calculated at an organization, function, department, or worker type level?
Recruiters should also break down how much it costs to source, interview, and close on a new hire.
Evaluating Your Recruiting Efforts is Worth It
Great employees are the lifeline of any company, so attracting and retaining talent should always be a top priority. Taking the time to understand your entire recruiting process allows you to make more effective, successful hires so your company can get the most out of your recruiting ROI.
Talent acquisition teams are turning to technology to help them hire top, qualified talent quickly. So, it’s crucial that they have an in-depth stack of TA software that reduces effort by using automation and AI. Looking to learn more about what Jobvite’s Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite can do for your team? To see Jobvite in action, watch the on-demand Jobvite Product Tour or request a live demo.
