A brief guide to making great hires and measuring your success
Kathleen Quinn Votaw //November 18, 2019//
A brief guide to making great hires and measuring your success
Kathleen Quinn Votaw //November 18, 2019//
An entire new industry of vendors has sprung up to answer your every question about hiring talent. Employers are spending about $20 billion a year on these new tools — most without knowing whether they work. Recruitment has moved into the Wild West, according to Wharton’s Peter Cappelli in his May Harvard Business Review article, “Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong.”
Amid all this opportunity and confusion, start with this question: How do we know whether our practices lead to the best employees? Meaning the people with the most talent and right culture fit —the ones who will help reach your full competitive potential. For that, you need a process that measures what’s working (or what’s not) and tells you what to pay attention to as you move forward. Measuring is the only tool that enables you to influence outcomes, either positive or negative. Without it you’re moving blind.
Below is a short guide on the questions you should ask, why you need to ask them and how to go about measuring whether your recruitment processes are working. The guide is based on over 15 years of firm experience working with companies of all industries and sizes throughout the country — and on finding our own way through this maze as we’ve grown.
The secret to successful recruitment is to maintain a sales mindset. Our advice always begins with: “treat candidates like you do customers.” You’ll be among a small minority of companies that monitor whether their hiring practices are working, which will put you way ahead in the talent war.
Typically, and unfortunately, most companies don’t think of hiring as an investment. It is, in fact, both an investment of money and time; and what you put into it is a strategic business decision. You should have a structure in place that answers the following fundamental questions:
Answers to all these questions help ensure that your approach to hiring is right. You’ll find answers through a combination of surveys, interviews, assessments and/or tracking software. If you’re using outside resources, their reports will provide additional data and insight.
Use the information to determine where and how much to invest in your recruitment budget and what areas you need to focus on to improve and update your practices. True success is measured in candidate quality, acquisition costs and conversions to long-term employee. Understanding how your practices impact the quality of your hires is among the most consequential aspects of business today.
Although it’s true that we can’t measure some of the things we value most, the adage, “we manage what we measure” is also true in business. It’s important that we pay attention to both skills and attitude, experience and culture fit, character and personality. A well-defined hiring process based on data and punctuated with personal observation helps us choose the right people.
As was said in the Wild West, “It don’t take a genius to spot a goat in a flock of sheep;” It takes a process.