Five Tips for Effective Hiring and Recruiting

Five Tips for Effective Hiring and Recruiting

by Steve Bonadio

Hiring and recruiting systems broaden the scope of legacy applicant tracking systems (ATS) by streamlining the entire hiring life cycle, from talent needs assessment and requisition creation to candidate selection and on-boarding.

Here are five tips talent managers can implement to get the most out of their hiring and recruiting investments.

Tip No. 1: Eliminate talent assessment and sourcing bottlenecks.

Many organizations are inundated with record numbers of applicants and resumes as job seekers significantly outnumber open positions. Compounding this challenge, HR and recruiting organizations are seriously resource-constrained.

For many organizations, talent assessment and sourcing processes are neither automated nor optimized, thus creating serious bottlenecks. The negative consequences of these bottlenecks include slow time to hire, low quality of hire, reduced hiring productivity and inconsistent collaboration and feedback.

A key solution to this problem is candidate filter management, which improves candidate flow and reduces bottlenecks by enabling users to more efficiently search, filter, pre-screen, assess, and rank and score applicants. By implementing a systematic candidate filtering process, organizations are better able to quickly find the right candidate for the job as well as ensure the long-term success of new hires.

Tip No. 2: Improve end-to-end process consistency and transparency.

A typical hiring and recruiting process is complex, time consuming and involves numerous constituents, including recruiters, hiring managers, approvers, interviewers and candidates. Because of the complexity, many users find that there is little consistency and transparency in the overall process, which negatively impacts hiring quality, timeliness and effective decision making.

There are four essential steps involved in the hiring and recruiting process, with each step flowing from the previous one:

a) Talent needs assessment:

Assessing the talent requirements and managing job requisitions.

b) Sourcing management:

Recruiting for an open position both internally and externally.

c) Candidate evaluation:

Evaluating candidates' skills and competencies and managing the interview process.

d) Offer and on-boarding management:

Managing job offers and transitioning candidates to employment.

To ensure consistency across the entire hiring and recruiting process, each step must flow seamlessly into the next step via automated workflows, and alerts and triggers must be established to notify users of pending action items. Each step by itself must also be optimized. Across the entire hiring and recruiting process, reporting and analytics must be enabled to support effective decision making.

Tip No. 3: Promote talent mobility.

In many organizations, talent mobility is impeded because there is no consistent or systematic process for aligning current and future talent needs to the existing talent inventory. Without a cohesive talent mobility strategy, organizations face several risks, including a focus on costly external recruiting versus internal sourcing as well as lower high performer engagement and higher churn.

Organizations should consider the following integrated processes to promote and enable talent mobility:

a) Current workforce analysis:

Includes detailed talent profiles, employee summaries, organization charts, competencies and job templates.

b) Talent needs assessment:

A key process within the overall hiring and recruiting process responsible for defining talent requirements.

c) Future needs analysis:

Development-centric succession planning to create and manage dynamic, fully populated talent pools.

Tip No. 4: Link hiring and recruiting to broader talent processes.

Many organizations tend to focus myopically on the hiring and recruiting process itself and do not consider how the process links to broader talent processes.

Organizations can drive greater efficiencies by taking a more holistic view of hiring and recruiting. Several broader talent processes present themselves for integration, including performance management (create and align new hire goals to divisional and company goals), career development (create competency-based career plans for new hires), and learning management (automatically schedule courses for new hires, especially important for compliance).

Tip No. 5: Improve reporting, measurement and decision making.

Tactical hiring and recruiting metrics, such as time to hire and source yields, used by many organizations today are inadequate and do not enable continuous improvement or facilitate better decision making. The majority of organizations continue to measure their hiring and recruiting effectiveness based on how long it takes to fill a position, how much it costs and where candidates are sourced.

Part of the challenge lies in the fact that data is spread out in various silos across the organization and there's no common employee system of record. A single, fully connected talent platform that covers the gamut of HR functions and processes - including hiring and recruiting - can alleviate some problems since the data is all in one place. With this infrastructure in place, organizations can more readily leverage strategic workforce analytics that provide meaningful cross-functional metrics, such as on-boarding effectiveness and the impact of learning programs on employee performance.

[About the Author: Steve Bonadio is a 15-year veteran of the enterprise software industry and currently serves as the vice president of product marketing for Softscape.]