Article: Managing risks when hiring the right fit!

Recruitment

Managing risks when hiring the right fit!

Review your hiring process and understand the inefficiencies that can be tightened up.
Managing risks when hiring the right fit!

The cost of a bad hire significantly impacts a business. No matter how big or small your business is, there is always an element of risk involved in hiring new employees. 

According to research, supervisors, on an average spend 17% of their time overseeing poorly performing employees. The report also suggests that around 95% of employers say that poor hiring negatively impacts the morale of the team. The entanglements of a bad hire go beyond the monetary element, extending to the corporate culture and overall performance of a workplace. Therefore, it is necessary for Talent Acquisition professionals to understand and know the chief risks associated with hiring.

Following are the key risks a TA professionals can face at various stages of the recruitment process:

Overspend on sourcing

Recruitment has evolved from being a cost centre to revenue centre. Therefore, recruiting teams have to create not only project plans, but they should also strategize to ensure business buy-in to get their strategies moving forward. 

Effective sourcing increases your chances of finding the perfect profile in this hyper-competitive talent market. However, using multiple sourcing channels can impact the overall recruitment budget. 

Solution:  Pre-assessments and Sourcing through job portals are a great way to keep a check on your sourcing spend. Since these tools are easy-to-use and accessible, talent acquisition professionals can leverage them instead of keeping track of multiple sourcing channels.

Screening the profile and not capability

Having an active screening process in place makes the difference between finding the perfect fit for your organization and making a wrong hiring decision. 

Notable changes in technology over the past few years are having an overwhelming influence on recruiting strategies, with recruiters increasingly using social networking sites to the source, contact, and screen both active and passive job candidates.

Screening a candidate from a pile of resumes and applications requires a manager to spend a considerable amount of time in the process. Instead, what managers should focus on is interviewing the right candidates. Recruiting managers today end up screening candidates on the basis of profile and not capability.

Solution: Using pre-screening check and Cognitive and communication assessments are a great way of screening candidates for their ability to perform the job. 

Ineffective and incomplete evaluation process

To save time, many times recruiting manager fails to collect, confirm and clarify information.  Many times they opt to use group interviews or panel interviews for efficiency sake, but they may fall prey to socially desirable responses. 

The incomplete and infective evaluation process can lead to:

  • Bias in the candidate evaluation process – especially relevant in organizations not using assessments or other scientific candidate evaluation approaches.
  • Managers tend to give higher importance to certain qualities (halo effect) and not effectively evaluate all the requirements (skills, behaviours, communication, qualifications/ previous experience, cognitive ability) for the job.


Solution: While evaluating a candidate, use functional, behavioural and personality assessment for a complete assessment of the candidate. Avoid pen and paper assessments as they are not scalable. Also, ensure the assessments are not ill-designed as they are prone to gaming and socially desirable responses.

Negative Candidate Experience

Studies suggest that a negative candidate experience, especially during interviews, can lead to dilution of employer brand. Candidates who face negative experience during interviews are vocal about their experience and share those experience online via an employer review site, such as Glassdoor; a social networking site; or directly with a colleague or friend.

  1. A bad candidate experience can arise due to following actions:
  2. Ad-hoc interviewing processes – lack of standardization across hiring managers
  3. Low interviewing capability in hiring managers

Solution: Hiring managers need to spend more time on interviewing and recruiting at the expense of doing their regular day-jobs. An interview guide and candidate evaluation guide should be prepared to have a standard hiring process across the organization. Additionally, interviewing skills training should be conducted promptly to avoid a bad experience. 

Early attrition

Often during pre-screening, recruiters or hiring managers don't clarify job roles to the candidates they are hiring, and thus it leads to a mismatch in candidates and role expectation. Also, a lack of pre-joining and induction process leaves the new hire helpless and find it difficult to settle in an entirely new environment.

Solution: Give a job preview and tell candidates what is expected of them in the pre-screening stage. This will help avoid mismatch of expectations. Have a structured induction process that includes quizzes and case studies to help candidates to assimilate into the organization. 

Expectation surveys can act as a great tool in measuring if the new hire's expectations match up with the actual job. They are usually conducted immediately after the new hire orientation.

Hiring is no longer a formal process of paperwork and awkward interviews. Review your hiring process and understand the inefficiencies that can be tightened up. The most important asset of any business or any organization is its people. Hiring managers need to realize that hiring the right candidate takes time, so they need to be patient, and develop a comprehensive hiring plan and execute it flawlessly. 

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Topics: Recruitment, #TAWeek, #HiringScience

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