Take a look at the statements below – do any of the following familiar to you?
You spend your time interviewing candidates who you thought were the high-potentials, while they actually weren’t.
You struggle to keep candidates engaged throughout the hiring process.
You simply do not have enough hours in the day to go through all the piles of CVs.
You are losing candidates to your competitors.
Did hiring efficiency cross your mind as you were reading these statements? Well, a few years ago when scaleups mentioned this ‘term’, the first thing that popped into everyone´s mind was candidate screening. And then perhaps the second thought was that hiring efficiency is only a relevant topic only when hiring a huge amount of people or receiving a huge amount of applications.
In reality, though, hiring efficiency is more than just that (at least has become over the years) – it is based on the overall clarity of expectations. Expectations of the job, the missing links in the team, and ultimately the ideal candidate profile in terms of skills, personality, and track record.
However, many companies tend to forget that hiring efficiency largely impacts hiring quality as well. Inefficient processes raise the chance of making the wrong hiring decisions and might force candidates to walk to the competitor.
You and I both very well know that hiring efficiency is about making the right decisions while spending as few resources as possible. However, actions speak louder than words and sometimes we tend to talk more than actually do.
In this blog, I will tell you about:
- 3 main reasons why you might struggle when creating a truly efficient hiring process;
- How to improve hiring efficiency without sacrificing hiring quality.
3 main reasons why you might be struggling to improve hiring efficiency
Reason 1. You might think you don’t have the right applicants when you actually just don’t know who you need.
Imagine a situation where you’ve been on the hunt for the right person to fill a desperately needed position for months. Now, you’ve even began doubting whether there is a right person out there for the job – the perfect culture fit, with the right skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.
If there is – why haven’t you found them yet? Perhaps you should settle for someone competent but not quite right? Or perhaps you should review all the candidates you rejected once again? Just in case?
The result?
You probably think that you know precisely what would make someone successful in your company, what skills they need and what kind of a person they must be. The fact that you have this idea of what makes someone a top-performer in your team at the moment, does not mean that they are the best out there. Or that hiring someone who possesses the same traits will automatically take your business to the next level.
If you blindly guess what you should be looking for in a new hire, you will end up:
- Rejecting the best candidates
- Wasting time on unfit candidates during the screening & interview process
- Eventually making mishires
- Decreasing your hiring efficiency and simultaneously – hiring quality
- And ultimately, significantly slowing down your company growth.
Reason 2. The process of screening & interviewing candidates takes too much time.
Without a doubt, screening and interviewing candidates can be one of the most time-consuming tasks throughout the hiring process.
While simultaneously being one of the most important aspects because after all, you want to make sure you’re screening and ultimately interviewing the right people instead of wasting your time on unqualified candidates.
Let’s say you receive 20 CVs on a job, and spend at least a minute per application on scanning the resume. Out of these 20 people, you invite 2 to an interview, and eventually, only one gets hired.
Now, let’s say your job posting receives 200 CVs. Now, you not only need to scan 200 CVs, but you also need to decide which 4-6 candidates out of these 200 will be invited for an interview. If the average time you spend reviewing CVs is 1 minute – you will end up spending 200 minutes reviewing them. And even though that doesn’t sound so bad, it actually is. Because how can you decide which candidates are the best suited for a role by just taking a short glimpse at their CV?
If the process of screening and interviewing candidates takes too much time, it will result in:
- Candidates losing interest in the job and pursuing other opportunities instead (the top prospect candidates are off the market in 10 days).
- When your company has a long recruitment process, potential candidates might feel their career potential will be stifled by a slow-moving organisation and withdraw themselves from the job application process.
- Candidates might feel that the company lacks innovation and motivation as well.
- A long screening and interviewing process that will damage your employer brand image and the candidate experience.
- On top of that, this might drive you in a corner – you will start to hire anyone that applies, without taking into consideration their suitability for the role – just to fill the role.
Reason 3. The other side of the coin: too much focus on time to hire.
Time to hire ticks all the boxes when it comes to our desires when assessing hiring efficiency – it’s very easy to define, it’s even easier to measure, and you can measure it right after you made a hire.
Yes, having a low time to hire would indicate that the hiring process is set up efficiently. However, ’’hire fast, fire faster’’ is the most dangerous hiring mantra for any company.
Why? By focusing on primarily ensuring an open job position is filled as quickly as possible, your focus will shift away from quality to speed. Time to hire is not very indicative of your hiring efficiency if the new hire ends up walking away after 3 months and you’re stuck just where you first began – with an empty job role and tons of sunk costs. 😉
The Result? Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality
The debate of quantity vs quality is ongoing in many different parts of our lives, also in the realm of hiring. There are two common ways people tend to look at this:
- Some argue that a quantity-inclined hiring process increases chances of finding someone who fits the job role faster or simply just having more candidates to pick from. In fact, time to hire is rated as one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) when assessing the effectiveness of the recruitment process.
- Others argue that playing the waiting game is the safest bet when it comes to hiring – to avoid making a hire that is a bad fit. Yet, this can imply that the job roles stay open for too long, so you begin to settle for less and this eventually leads to an overall lack of diversity within your teams.
What we often see going wrong when companies are boosting their recruitment processes and simultaneously attempting to reduce the time to hire, is that quantity of candidates gets mistaken with quality.
The reality, however, is different – quantity is a vanity metric when attracting talent. Why?
Because for a recruitment process to be efficient, value should be placed upon the quality of the candidates. Attracting talent in general is not easy, so it comes without surprise that attracting top-quality talent can prove to be even more challenging. Unless you have the right processes and tools in place to succeed.
How to improve hiring efficiency without sacrificing hiring quality
Here at Equalture, we have built a library of scientifically-validated game-based psychometric tests, to help companies get to know their candidates’ skills, behavior, and personality in an objective way, rather than having to guess by looking at someone’s resume.
This way allowing you to reduce time-to-hire while simultaneously improving your hiring quality.
Here’s how!
Solution 1. Actually knowing who you need
Knowing what to look for in a new hire is absolutely crucial to being able to make the right hiring decision. And to know what you need in a new hire, you should first assess your current teams and employees. Game-based assessments allow you to determine the natural, unconscious behaviour and abilities of your current employees.
By assessing the current team first, you will get a clear overview of the current representation of your team – so for example, if your team consists of highly flexible people only, or not. This will help you determine what to look for in your next hire.
Solution 2. Save time screening candidates
Game-based assessments, in contrast to traditional tests, can be introduced early in the process, because:
- They are short & immersive. This reduces stress and anxiety, resulting in a much better Candidate Experience. On top of that – it only takes 15-25 mins to complete!
- Engaging for candidates. To win the ongoing talent war, as a company it’s about time to prioritise candidate experience when determining your recruiting methods.
- Average CX Rating 4.49/5
By assessing your candidates early in the process, you allow yourself to spend time interviewing the high-potentials only, resulting in a shorter time-to-hire and less time spent per hire, while simultaneously improving hiring quality.
Solution 3. Finding the balance between speed & quality
Equalture allows you to focus your time on the right people, decrease the number of candidates to interview, and the number of steps in the process (after all, you’ll already have a lot of insights at the starts). This way allowing you to find a balance between hiring speed and hiring quality. After all, time is money.
Say bye-bye to endless hours of reviewing CVs and say hello to improved hiring quality & efficient hiring process! 😉
Cheers, Anete
