Is it Time to Review your Hiring Process?
Is it time to review your hiring process? Too often we’ve been hearing the phrase “It’s a candidate driven market” thrown around in recent literature in talent acquisition. But what does this imply to employers? And most importantly how can employers tackle this issue?
Being TA consultants embedded in talent acquisition processes of multiple companies we believe the most immediate and effective response for this current issue is to look at your hiring process and ensure that it is effective and efficient.
A hiring process not only helps you find potential candidates but has a significant impact on how quickly you can find candidates, candidate opinion of the company and the cost to hire a new employee. Potential candidates are likely to apply to several roles and generally tend to select the most impressive company of all. It’s not all about the salary or benefits so it’s crucial to create a positive candidate experience. Poor candidate retention can have a huge impact on a company as it will affect your selection of candidates for future hires. Having a large talent pool for future hires minimises company cost and speeds up the hiring process. Finding weaknesses within your hiring process by asking candidates of their experience can help to create a guideline of what you need to improve.
The nature of the hiring process can convey a lot to a potential candidate. Ex: A long hiring process could lead to potential candidates going elsewhere. The longer the hiring process the more money it costs the company. Whereas a concise and efficient hiring process would generally make the candidate see that company as organized and reliable. Simple things like automating the application process or integrating an application tracking system (ATS) could reflect the company as being modern and innovative and would easily allow it to stand out against a company that calls candidates to email their CV to the careers email. Similarly, using modern tools like pre-employment screening and digital interviews can speed up the process and create a positive experience with the company which will feed into candidate retention. This in turn will reduce company expenditure.
The Harvard Business Review suggests that changing consensus-oriented interviewing to structured interviews with numerical ratings can also help reduce the extensive time taken on getting hiring manger feedback after interviews.
Employers need to understand the competitiveness of the market in order to stay ahead in the game. However, changing a company’s processes and hiring culture will not be easy. But if you feel your company currently has issues in attracting talent and your candidate pool is decreasing, it would be high time to review your hiring process and look at these areas to try and create a faster, simpler, and effective way to hire your candidates especially in this “candidate driven market”.
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Barry Prost
Managing Partner
15 years’ experience recruiting senior managers for major international consultants and contractors. Barry is one of the founding directors of Propel. Prior to this, Barry worked for 10 years for Randstad, the 2nd largest recruitment organisation in the world. Managing teams across the UK and Ireland & delivering recruitment solutions to major clients. Barry is a graduate in International Business from Trinity College Dublin. He has a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from the Smurfit School of Business.
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