Fast & Furious – not the best way to hire new talent

Fast & Furious – not the best way to hire new talent

Fast and furious only works in movies, especially ones with big CGA budgets. For the rest of us, it usually ends up with fines , accidents, regrets, and sometimes even worse. Hiring new talent is no exception. Fast and furious is not working in recruitment. In fact, it is failing miserably.

A recent Thompson International research found that 57% of new hires in UK are not working in the same capacity after 12 months, with 25% not working at all. New talent, who are supposed to be so highly motivated and eager for their new opportunities, seem to quit their discretionary efforts within a year. All that effort, time and money wasted. They are gone. Back to square one. Just think about it. 1 out of 4 quit early. No matter how you look at it, 25% early turnover is way too fast, way too furious.

How did we get here? We have centers of expertise, cutting edge technologies, employer branding and much more. Still, recruitment feels like a losing race.

How did we get here? We have centers of expertise, cutting edge technologies, employer branding and much more. Still, recruitment feels like a losing race.Too many positions, talent scarcity, too many agencies fighting over the same talent pool for the same positions. Too much pressure. HR teams struggle with ever increasing hiring manager expectations and lack of integration of their many different tools in their far from ideal recruitment processes.

WRONG KPIS

Part of the problem is with our most favourite solution. We seem to be tracking the wrong KPIs for a long time now. Most companies are tracking the usual suspects when they evaluate their recruitment solutions; the number of applicants, number of interviews, time to fill, time to offer, etc. How fast did we move candidates down the pipeline? And we all know the golden rule; you get what you mesure. Fast and…you know the word.

UNDERSTANDING HIRING MANAGER EXPECTATIONS

Yes, speed is important. Hiring managers are expecting a shortlist of candidates to be interviewed in a short, very short time frame. But finding as many candidates as fast as possible is not as important as the quality of those candidates. Hiring managers’ real expectation is not to interview as many candidates as possible. It is the opposite, really. Nobody wants to find out that none of the 12 candidates are a good fit with the job and the culture after 12 separate, one hour-long, repetitive interviews. In fact, what hiring managers really need is as few candidates as possible, who are a perfect match according to a very important KPI, that only a few companies are tracking at the moment: Positional Fit and Organizational Fit.

POSITIONAL FIT – Can the candidate perform at this job at a high level?

This is the main question isn't it? Very simple straightforward question, answer to which should be the essence of all our recruitment efforts. But how do we define a good fit? Although, there is not an universal definition, most of the research seem to agree with the criteria below:

  • Experience Level of the candidate – enough experience in industry, function or professional area that the job requires
  • Technical Skills – Knowledge & ability level in technical areas of the job; software, operations, level of the candidate in all the knowledge based requirements of the job
  • Behavioral Competencies – level of competence in key company specific priorities ; team skills, customer orientation, communication, etc.
  • Personality Traits – Difficult to change, inherited personal traits that can drive or derail a person’s performance – extraversion, conscientiousness, levels of neuroticism, etc.

A good recruitment process needs to assess each and every one of these criteria in detail with high quality data and hiring decisions must be based on this data on four areas of fit.

ORGANIZATIONAL FIT – Will the candidate continue to perform at high levels and want to stay with the company?

This is also a very important question. The one we don’t seem to pay enough attention to if you look at the results of the above mentioned study. It is not enough to find candidates with high positional fit, but we also have to find new talent that is going to stay and strive, as well. Defining that is even trickier. Two important areas of fit between what the candidate brings and the organization offers seem to work the best:

  • Personal Motivation – Fit between personal values, drivers, areas of interest and priorities of the talent and the organizational values and opportunities
  • Team Climate – The fit between the kind of culture and climate the existing team works and strives in; basic assumptions about how work gets done, deadlines are met and team works together

Better the fit in motivation and culture, better the outlook of a long, sustainable high performance level. Everyone’s happy.

A GOOD DESIGN

How much of those six critical areas of good fit are we measuring? Unfortunately, less and less today. Most companies are giving up on knowledge and competency assessments in favour of a quick pipeline.

In this highly competitive, uncertain and unforgiving talent landscape, increasing the time commitment, rigor and complexity of our recruitment processes seems to be counterintuitive and wrong but it is the right thing to do.

In this highly competitive, uncertain and unforgiving talent landscape, increasing the time commitment, rigor and complexity of our recruitment processes seems to be counterintuitive and wrong but it is the right thing to do.What we are doing with quick Linkedin searches, CV gazing, 4 minute telephone verifications and haphazard hiring manager interviews is not working.

We need more assessments and better data, better design and execution to find out the level of fit between the position and the talent. Instead of fast and furious, what we really need is fast and fastidious. And, we need it fast.