10
Questions to assess recruiting effectiveness -
Building
a great organization is getting the RIGHT PEOPLE on your team... but
FIRST YOU HAVE TO FIND THEM!
Business
leaders agree that hiring qualified, productive employees is one of the
critical foundations for growth and profitability, and they also acknowledge
that recruiting good employees is one of their top challenges. Managers
report the following recruiting problems:
• |
Recruits
don’t perform as expected
|
• |
Recruiting
takes too long |
• |
Recruit
turnover is too high |
• |
Recruiters
cost too much |
When
assessing your own organization, consider the following:
Click
here to download full report (pdf)
1.
Are the candidates you hire meeting or exceeding job expectations?
Millions of business owners have discovered the hard way that the ideal
candidate they hired has a hidden flaw or no motivation to do the job.
When too many people don’t perform, companies lose profits, market
share, and sales. Morale suffers, and restructuring only makes things
worse. If the candidates you hire are not meeting job expectations,
you need to determine whether the problem is recruiting related or not.
If the recruits are the main problem, then you need to address the deficiencies
in your recruiting system. (return
to top)
2. What is it costing
your business to hire people that are not meeting expectations?
Because
the cost of poor performance can be so significant, quantifying those
costs is a good way to justify investing in a better recruiting system.
So do the numbers, and you will have a strong case for improving your
recruiting efforts. (return to top)
3. Do you suffer from
high employee turnover?
High turnover is a serious problem because it affects so many areas.
Recruiting and training costs are usually significantly higher in companies
with high turnover, and productivity, quality, and service are significantly
lower.
Other
business issues such as poor training, bad management, or an uncompetitive
business position can cause high turnover, and these issues must be
addressed. Assuming the turnover is recruiting related, you need to
identify the causes. Typically they fall into the following categories:
• Not having a clear profile of the skills and characteristics
required for success
• Looking for candidates in the wrong places
• Rushing the recruiting and selection process because you’re
too busy with other activities
• Poor interviewing skills that do not separate people who will
perform from people who will not perform
• The selection process allows candidates with serious flaws
or mismatched motivation to get hired.
(return to top)
4.
What is the cost of this turnover and how does it compare to your competitors?
Employee turnover increases recruiting and training costs; these direct
costs make investments in reducing turnover easy to justify. Factor
in the indirect costs such as lower productivity, poorer service, and
lower quality, and reducing turnover becomes a critical priority for
businesses that have higher turnover than competitors.
Because
employer turnover is so costly, businesses need to understand how they
compare to competitors. If a competitor has significantly lower turnover,
it costs will not only be lower, but also its service and quality will
be better. The company with lower turnover can therefore have happier,
more loyal customers, and loyal customers are profitable customers.
Companies with high turnover and poor service lose customers whereas
companies with lower turnover gain market share. (return
to top)
5. How much are vacant
positions costing your business?
In today’s competitive, cost conscious environment, rising productivity
allows companies to produce more work with fewer people. Still, when
necessary positions are vacant, both the businesses, employees and customers
suffer. When you figure the cost of poor performing employees, you can
also calculate the direct and indirect costs of having open positions.
Unhappy customers, stressed out employees, and lost business are the
consequences of a slower than necessary recruiting process.
While
it is foolish to shortcut the process if you end up hiring the wrong
people, it makes sense to examine your process and understand how it
compares to best practices in your industry and in others. Find out
what others are doing to hire qualified people quickly, and talk to
experts who can help you evaluate your process. (return
to top)
6. Do you use a proven,
employee profile with the qualifications and characteristics necessary
for job success and satisfaction?
Use of an ideal employee profile is common practice at successful companies.
Companies have a job description that defines the duties, responsibilities,
experience, skills sets required and compensation, but they don’t
identify the behaviors and attitudes required for that same success.
They don't define the person they are looking for, merely the position.
If you use a profile that has not been updated in the past year, review
the profile with current requirements and compare it against your most
productive people to make sure your profile is up to date.
If
you do not have a clear profile of the skills and characteristics required
for success in a given position, develop one and use it in your recruiting
process. If you do not have experience developing such profiles, consult
a recruiting expert who will take the time to understand your business
and develop the profiles you need. A good profile includes not only
knowledge and skills but also job motivations, behaviors, and organizational
fit. (return to top)
7. Does your interview
and selection process separate performers from pretenders?
With so many people misrepresenting themselves on resumes, interviewers
need to use techniques that separate performers from pretenders. Effective
employee selection combines a proven employee profile and a valid interview
process. Employee selection has been studied extensively by scholars
and consultants; choose a selection process that has been validated
in dozens of studies to identify the people that match a job profile
and will actually do the job and fit in the organization.
Unlike
stock market performance, past employee behavior is a good predictor
of future employee behavior, and it is critical that interviewers use
methods that uncover how people behaved in a specific situation.
Because people are not thorough if they don’t follow a process,
the best interview processes:
•
use a method to ask the series of questions that uncover past behavior
• use forms that contain both effective questions and a place
to document the interview
• use multiple interviewers and a system for sharing information
that prevents interviewer impressions or incomplete interviews from
uncovering hidden flaws or mismatched motivations
(return to top)
8. Can you use recruiting
strategies that deliver qualified candidates and cost significantly
less than traditional recruiters or newspaper advertising?
While it may make sense to use an expensive executive recruiter with
extensive personal networks and recruiting skills to find a CEO, the
Internet has made it possible for companies and recruiters to find highly
qualified candidates from executives to hourly workers at significantly
lower costs. Traditional recruiters can cost up to 30% of a candidates
first year compensation, so unless other recruiting cannot deliver a
comparable candidate, it makes sense to investigate lower cost alternatives
that are effective. The question is "where do you spend your advertising
dollars?" Are those dollars being spent to target top talent to
your company and well as advertise your products and services? (return
to top)
9. How do people who
are currently employed look for new opportunities?
In a recent study that focused on where people spend their time vs.
where companies spend their advertising dollars, the ad dollars did
not quite mirror the exposure the companies received. (return
to top)
10.
What are some of the key competencies you need to build internally or
when would you engage a recruiting firm?
Recruiting firms and all managers that make hiring decisions need to develop
employee selection capabilities that include:
• developing and updating successful employee profiles so you
have a clear picture of candidates that will perform, stay motivated,
and fit in the organization as described above
• interviewing skills to separate performers from pretenders
• using a selection system for sharing information that prevents
interviewer impressions or incomplete interviews from uncovering hidden
flaws or mismatched motivations
Depending
on their situation, companies can choose whether to develop and maintain
other recruiting functions as a core competence. Here are some of the
capabilities companies need to maintain or look for in professional
recruiters.
• knowing where good candidates look for opportunities
• cultivating referral networks for qualified people
• understanding the most cost effective ways and places to find
quality candidates
• writing and placing recruiting ads that target a current job
profile
• screening candidates efficiently and effectively
• performing initial interviews
• ordering background checks
• maintaining a recruiting information system
• maintaining a recruiting web site
Building
and maintaining these recruiting capabilities requires dedicated Human
Resources professionals because most managers do not have the time to
do all these tasks for their functional area. Because it is difficult
for one person to perform all these recruiting tasks, the labor and overhead
costs to perform them quickly surpass $100,000 annually at smaller firms
and run into the millions at larger firms. (return
to top)
For
a PDF copy of this report, CLICK
HERE
To
read more about making the decision to use professional recruiting organization
click here...

|