Saving time while improving hiring quality. The #1 KPI for every single Recruiter, Recruitment Manager, HR Director or even Founder.
The number of blogs trying to help us with this challenge is overwhelming, and the number of tips is even higher: Implement a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS), structure your interviews, automate administrative tasks, etc. etc. Yes, this is all more than true, but I think there’s one really easy tip that no one is every talking about.
Just changing the order. In this blog I will tell you (1) why and (2) how.
From application to offer.
Since the strength of Equalture (our pre-selection technology) isn’t focused on sourcing, I will start this story from the moment that the application starts, so I call this the actual hiring process steps.
Based on a large number of companies I’ve visited over the last few years I’ve experienced that these are the most common hiring process steps:
- Pre-selection;
- Phone screening;
- 1st interview;
- 2nd interview/case study;
- Offer.
Pre-selection (100% of all candidates)
- What: Candidate screening based on their resume to create a first shortlist.
- Focus on: Resume (i.e. track record).
- Average duration per candidate: 5 minutes.
Phone screening (40% of all candidates)
- What: Introduction between the candidate and the company to verify the conclusions of your first screening.
- Focus on: Verifying the first ‘conclusions’ you’ve made.
- Average duration per candidate: 20 minutes.
(Note: This 40% is based on the assumption that you’ve shared your jobs only on qualitative job boards)
1st interview (35% of all candidates)
- What: Interview questions to find out whether someone is capable for the job and whether someone fits the team.
- Focus on: Matchmaking.
- Average duration per candidate: 75 minutes (incl. preparations and follow-up discussion)
2nd interview/case study (20% of all candidates)
- What: Interview questions/case to verify your thoughts concerning job fit and team fit.
- Focus on: Matchmaking.
- Average duration per candidate: 90 minutes (incl. preparations and follow-up discussion)
So this means that you spend on average 3,16 hours on one candidate if (s)he makes it up to the actual job offer. Moreover, I assume that at least one other colleague will join both the 1st and 2nd interview, so that makes it 5,9 hours. Quite a lot, isn’t it?
A quick calculation.
Now let’s assume that you have a job opening and 20 applications. This means:
- 20 candidates in the pre-screening (100 minutes);
- 8 candidates in the phone screening (160 minutes);
- 7 candidates in the 1st interview (525 minutes);
- 4 candidates in the 2nd interview/case study (360 minutes).
And eventually 1 candidate is hired. This means you spent 19 hours on the actual hiring process steps (excl. sourcing, defining the job, etc.).
You know what’s the top 3 reasons why people still don’t get hired when they’ve made it to the 1st interview? It’s a lack of skill/job fit, a lack of personality fit or they found another job. Alright, reason three is ‘out of your hands’, so let’s say that 80% is caused by a lack of fit (in my example 6 candidates).
These 6 candidates have costed you 11,8 hours of your time. That’s more than half of the total time. Pretty frustrating, right? Learning more about their fit earlier in the process would have saved you half of your time per job opening.
The secret: Change the order.
Or actually: bring the matchmaking to the very first step.
How cool would it be to already learn more about someone’s skills, intelligence and personality in the beginning of this hiring process? In other words, how cool would it be to be able to not only base your pre-screening on a resume (i.e. track record), but also on someone’s potential?!
That’s basically what Equalture does. Our pre-selection technology helps our clients to predict a candidate’s success within their company even during the very first evaluation. By doing we make the phone screening stage superfluous and help you focusing on only the top notch candidates during the interview stages.
This is how.
Step 1. We facilitate a new application flow
Because of the fact that we want to gather more information than just someone’s resume and a motivation letter, we replace the traditional application form by our application flow.
Goal: Being able to gather the data we actually need to predict success.
Step 2. We use gamification
So now we have the application flow that enables us to gather the data we actually need, cool. Resume data is not that difficult; we just make it possible to connect your LinkedIn profile to the application (and of course you can always adjust this).
The bigger challenge is how to gather data concerning personality, skills and intelligence. Since we want to know this already after the very first application, it shouldn’t take too long to prevent any dropout.
That’s why we’ve implemented games in the application flow: validated assessments, but short and fun while they’re actually able to measure a candidate’s behaviour and skills. Here you can read why we’ve chosen for games instead of traditional assessments.
Goal: Learning more about a candidate’s personality, skills and intelligence.
Step 3. We have built a matching algorithm
Alright, so step 1 and 2 make it possible to gather all the data we need to predict a candidate’s success. Now the last step is to feed our AI-matching algorithm with this data to calculate a candidate’s matching score.
This matching score helps you to evaluate your candidates based on the criteria you would normally gather during the interview, so now you can choose your top candidate pool and focus all your attention on these top players. During the interview stages you can dive deeper into someone’s outcome and verify this outcome.
Goal: Helping clients to only focus on the top-notch candidates
The result: Focus on the top notch candidates, increase the conversion between your interview steps and hire the very best candidate way faster.
Do you want any more tips on how to make this happen within your company? Or are you curious to see how this actually works in practice? Just schedule a meeting with us, we’re more than happy to help!
Cheers, Charlotte
