Best Recruiting Practices Series-Answering Your Questions

Last month, I addressed some questions we have received from recruiting professionals who reached out to me for after reading my prior articles. This month, I will answer some more: how to maintain an even keel during tumultuous times, how to attain balance in volume hiring, and determining — and overcoming — the costs of a bad hire.

The Staffing Rollercoaster

We can all agree that 2018 has been a rollercoaster in the staffing world. Both recruiters and candidates are experiencing highs and lows that haven’t been seen in years. How do you handle it? How can you keep yourself, and your business, on a more-even keel during tumultuous times?

• Recruit more proactively. With time-to-fill near record highs, companies that start their search for skilled workers the soonest win the war for talent. Identifying both current and future skills gaps is necessary — and creating a comprehensive plan to overcome them is vital.
• Rely on qualified temporary and contract employees. Contingent workers with the right skills can help quickly plug the gaps, shorten learning curves, and even train your core employees on new skills.
• Verify the information and experience supplied by your candidates. Intelligent staffing begins with having the best-quality candidates available, and one terrific way to ensure that yours are the best is to verify them, and their information, at the outset of the process. A service like VeriKlick can be your secret weapon – working in conjunction with your current ATS or database system, verifying each candidate’s information for you with only a couple of mouse clicks. You’ll have the security of knowing that you are building a solid base of qualified and verified applicants.

Maintaining Quality During Volume Hiring

Is volume hiring an essential element of your business? It can be a time-consuming and costly venture, with the potential to drive revenues sky-high — or cause you to crash-and-burn if you don’t handle it correctly. As the pressure for large hiring volumes increases, recruiting high-quality talent must remain a priority. How do you strike the perfect balance between volume, speed-of-hire, and candidate excellence, the balance that keeps you and your clients happy and satisfied?

• Deliver a high-touch candidate experience. The human touch is always needed in recruiting, volume or otherwise — you don’t want to risk relying solely on technology to build and maintain business, or reduce your volume recruitment campaign to an impersonal experience for candidates. Whether you are recruiting for just one hard-to-fill role, or one thousand oil field workers, the success of your volume recruitment and getting the best candidates relies on high-touch relationships. Gentle-touch, but high-touch! Always remember that candidates are as important as your clients.
• Keep your talent acquisition process simple. As the pressure mounts during the high-volume recruiting process, no one wants to get bogged down by the administrative tasks that take attention away from finding the best talent possible. You need to reduce the workload associated with volume recruitment in order to free up time and streamline your process for efficiency. One way to do this is to leverage technology for automated sourcing. Validate and verify your candidates before sending them off to interviews, instead of worrying about what happens if they get the job – but turned out to have submitted fake credentials. Work hand-in-hand with VeriKlick to give you the freedom to work more closely and engage with candidates and clients, while the technology does the groundwork for you.
• Creative sourcing is important. You’ll need a variety of sources to harvest qualified applicants. Job boards are a reliable source of recruits but you need to think outside the box. Colleges and universities make a great source for candidates seeking entry-level positions. You might uncover some unexpected treasures by keeping tabs on happenings in the community via a news outlet or the grapevine. The sale or acquisition of a local company can cause anxiety among their workers; if they have transferable skill sets, your impeccable timing should fill up your pipeline quickly! And remember to seek referrals from people whom you have placed, or didn’t place – but who enjoyed a positive experience with you and your company. Candidates understand that they will not get offers for every position they interview, and are often happy to refer recruiting professionals that treated them well during the process, even if they didn’t get the job.

The Consequences and Costs of a Poor Hire

While the financial impact of a bad hire is quantifiable, chief financial officers actually rank the morale and productivity impacts ahead of monetary losses. Disengagement is contagious, which may be why employers can’t seem to defeat it. Since Gallup began tracking employee engagement in 2000, less than one-third of U.S. employees report being enthusiastically involved and committed to their work. When disengaged hires don’t pull their own weight, good employees get burned out making up for it.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the total, actual cost of a bad hiring decision (or the choice not to hire at all), most accepted assessments put the cost of a bad hire between 150% and 300% of the annual salary for that position, for each year they remain employed.

The costs of a bad hire can be devastating to an employer. Not only is the replacement cost high, but a bad hire can also have a negative effect on the rest of the employees, the work culture, and the customer experience. To lower the chances of costly turnovers, hiring managers need to be diligent in finding the right candidate to fill a position. It’s up to you to help bridge that gap and be the solution for your clients! By investing time in properly wording and formatting the job posting, conducting and shepherding along the interview process, and pinpointing the proper hiring procedures, you can help ensure a better return of investment for each new hire.

Remember: Recruiting and staffing are all about finding as many facts as possible to help candidates and clients alike make the most informed decision hiring decision possible.