15 Sep Three Ways You Can Take Your Hiring Into the Future

In human resources, we spend 2% of our time recruiting, and 75% of our time trying to repair the damage from the wrong people we recruited. But this isn’t a fate that all hiring managers are doomed too.

Recruiting is changing, and over the last decade we’ve seen a massive shift from ‘active’ recruiting through to what has been coined ‘network recruiting.’ Active recruiting attempts to attract candidates through traditional channels such as print, job boards, agencies, and job search aggregators. However we are increasingly seeing that companies meet candidates through mechanisms such as professional networking sites, talent communities, and employee referrals. So what does this mean? That the job ads that many companies are posting are probably no longer being seen by the top, network savvy candidates. Here’s three ways in which hiring is changing, and how you can take advantage of this hiring revolution to find and hire the top talent.

1. Big data is meeting assessment: Big data is more than just a buzzword used by the wizards at Google, it’s having a massive effect in finding employees which fit the job and the corporate culture that they’ll be immersed in. And more than ever, this data is becoming increasingly job specific. We now know that depending on what job field you work in, there are a specific set of abilities and personality traits which will guarantee potential. By looking at a candidate’s education, background, and the data collected from psychometric assessments, we can determine how well an employee is going to fit in with the job and company culture. More than that, we can attain information as specific as how well they’re going to fit in with the team they’ll be working with.
2. Talent assessment is being applied earlier in the assessment process: Every piece of data on candidate numbers is showing one irrevocable conclusion – the average number of CV’s being received for job applications has doubled. And this means that the average amount of time spent looking at CV’s has halved, and now sits at around 7 seconds per candidate. To put it bluntly – for all you can get to know about a candidate in 7 seconds, you might as well select candidates by reading their tea leaves. But many companies are learning that by automatically screening out candidates based on personality and ability, they can remove the candidates from the pool who they know don’t have the attributes they need to excel in the job. In fact, this automated screening has proven to be so effective that the data we have collected shows that one major Australasian bank has reduced their time to hire by 50%, and enhanced the performance of their candidates by 47%. All while reducing training time and employee turnover.
3. Video interviewing is happening sooner: Gone are the days when recruiters needed to struggle with leaving innumerable unheard messages in a candidate’s voice mail. Automated video interviewing is cutting out this part of the process all together. Video interviewing lets recruiters set the interview questions, send them to candidates, and review the recorded responses at their convenience. This asynchronous process saves an inordinate amount of time, as HR managers don’t have to spend their time wrangling unreachable candidates. Further, by removing the influence of having a recruiter in the same room as the candidate, you remove much of the personal bias that comes from the interview process. Ultimately, this means that you have a more objective and data-driven hiring process. So you can hire employees based on what they can do, not on whether the recruiter and the candidate both hated the weather that day.

So why not try and reverse that damning statistic from the beginning of the article? Let’s build a world where we can spend 75% of the time getting to know the top performing candidates, and only 2% (or less) managing the hiring mistakes.