Interview Doctor

Hiring Process

A Special Event Just for Recruiters!

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Help wanted signs and Internet job boards are no longer the ideal hiring strategy.

Kent State University Stark EventIf your main method of recruiting is still placing advertisements on career boards or you have too much paperwork or other responsibilities to focus on recruiting then you probably react rather than plan. You are not alone.

These strategies produce the same candidates looking for a job.

The modern social media world demands a proactive approach to hiring!

Join me for Search Techniques That Bring Results: Proactive Recruiting on Wednesday, October 26th, 2016, at Kent State University at Stark from 8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

You will:

  • Plan which positions are best suited to proactive recruiting
  • Identify ideal candidates then build and maintain relationships through social media until the time is right
  • Understand the comprehensive connection between your business image in the marketplace and candidates
  • Understand how to utilize content to build relationships

Click here to purchase your ticket!

 

Employee Turnover – What are they saying about your business behind your back?

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A client called me in to give him a talent assessment of his leadership team.

reduce your hiring turnoverThis was about a 50 million family owned business, growing very quickly. It was an interesting project. While conducting the interviews I observed that they were doing a lot of hiring. The business was growing but the amount of hiring seemed out of proportion to the growth.

I discovered that the business did not measure employee turnover. They just accepted that they had to keep hiring because people kept quitting.

So I did a simple analysis and discovered that the employee turnover was over 50% for their main category of employees. That means that they had to hire 50% more people every year than they actually needed to accomplish their business goals. That is crazy!

I did a little more digging and found problems with pay, work environment and most important management skills or better stated, a lack of good management skills.

It is costly to hire, train then replace people on your team. It can cost upwards of twice an employee’s annual salary to find and train a replacement. In this company, 50% turnover was costing them almost double their labor costs. Reducing turnover will reduce their labor costs, reduce training costs, reduce the time and cost of hiring and most important improve morale and the ability to get something done.

Seems pretty important, doesn’t it? Yet this company and many other companies do not measure turnover and even if they do, they don’t do anything about it.

Such a costly waste of time, energy and money.

It is important to measure turnover monthly and annually to see if you are having issues. If your turnover is higher than you can tolerate, you should figure out what is going on. Is it management skills, something in your environment or are you hiring the wrong people? Only by understanding the reasons behind turnover can you begin to address this insidious and costly problem.

Here are some tips to reduce turnover:

  • Hiring the right people is the single most important way to reduce employee turnover. Interview candidates carefully. Have a solid hiring process that ensures you understand the answers to the 3 most important hiring questions: Can she do the job? Will she love the job? And will she get along with the team?
  • Pay attention to employees’ personal needs and be flexible where you can. Get creative with work schedules or day care needs. Flexibility goes a long way but it costs very little compared to the cost of employee turnover.
  • Bolster employee engagement. Say thank you. Make your workplace fun. Be sure managers respect and recognize employees regularly.
  • Give employees room to grow with challenging positions, training and developmental opportunities that they value.
  • Be sure everyone on the team understands the vision and goals for your business. Don’t make assumptions that they know what you are thinking.
  • According to many surveys, the number one reason people leave a company is because their boss is a jerk. If you even sniff out a boss who is a problem, address it immediately with coaching, training and reinforcement.

Employee turnover is a signal that there is a problem in your business. Measure it then figure out what is going on. We are always here for you if you need some help.

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Put a mirror to your Corporate Culture – The Candidate Experience

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It’s the little things that add up to a great candidate experience.

Early in her career Susan interviewed for a position as a chemist with a company that distributes supplies used in research laboratories. The interview went badly. The company representatives were not on time or prepared. They did not get back to her when they said they would and in fact were downright rude during the interviews and in the follow up. Susan was happy she did not get the job.

Susan went on to a very successful career in Research & Development person managing large labs in multiple locations.

For the rest of her career, some 30 years, she NEVER allowed anyone on her staff to order lab supplies from that company. She remembered that story like it was yesterday and repeated it often.

candidate experience reflects corporate cultureA candidate’s experience begins when they start researching the company. It continues through every interaction during the recruiting process. The interaction makes a lasting memory of the total experience, good or bad. It could influence their view of the company for years in the future. Just like Susan.

Perhaps you have had a similar experience in your life? Most people have.

Candidates invest a lot in a job search, preparing search materials, doing research, and preparing for interviews, not to mention time and money spent on travel and interviews. They resent it when they feel they are treated badly. They never forget and they tell others!

Given the candidate’s investment, don’t they deserve to be treated like good customers?

The cost of a poor customer experience adds up.

You lose good candidates now and in the future. They tell their friends, family and colleagues who won’t apply either and maybe won’t buy from you.

Employees stop referring their friends and maybe get disenchanted themselves. Disenchanted employees might leave or worse hang around with a bad attitude.

You will probably make more bad hires because the best candidates have more options.

All this word of mouth going on behind the scenes damages that corporate brand you work so hard to develop. It is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are characteristics of a great candidate experience.

  • Respond promptly to everything – phone calls, emails, applications, requests, job offers. Simply responding to candidates will improve the candidate experience. It also separates you from your competition.
  • Be flexible to the candidates’ needs, not rigid. Offer flexible interview scheduling and you will get the candidate’s attention.
  • Be honest and pay attention to candidates’ needs.
  • No unpleasant surprises – do what you say you will do, don’t change the specifications all the time, don’t change the schedule, be there when you say you are going to be there and respond when you say you will respond.
  • Solicit feedback from candidates and apply what you learn.
  • Keep candidates updated and explain what is going on. Tell people if there will be a delay. Ignoring candidates or stringing them out for your own convenience is particularly annoying.
  • Add an unexpected “wow” factor to seal the deal. How about a little muffin basket to welcome the new hire?

Time to get out that mirror and figure out what your candidates think about you then make adjustments.

Make every touch point a great experience. It is the little things that add up to a great candidate experience.

Informational sources:

Improving the Candidate Experience

2015 Talent Board North American Candidate Experience Research Report

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Jargon Soup: The difference between Recruitment and Talent Acquisition

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Is talent acquisition just another way of saying recruitment or is this just another jargon fad or is it something we should pay attention to?Talent acquisition or recruitment

I did a little research. According to some important human resource thought leaders, the difference between the two terms is strategic.

Bringing new talent into your organization is risky. So much can go wrong if you hire the wrong person.

Recruiting is the term we have used for years meaning to send out signals into the marketing place and bring a new person into your company to fulfill some important role. Recruitment is an action, a tactic. It is a process. It usually involves the activities of sourcing, screening, interviewing, selecting and hiring.

But the concept of bringing new talent into your organization should be more than a tactic. People are one of the costliest expenses. Adding new people changes your culture and allows you to reach a wider market. When the new person adds value, your organization is stronger. But when it doesn’t, wow you can have a problem. We should consider the concept of bringing new talent into your organization as a strategic initiative.

Talent acquisition includes the tactic of recruiting but also some strategic elements that help your business grow, such as:

  • Talent planning and strategy to ensure your talent is aligned with your strategic business plan
  • Employment branding: These are activities that help define your company image, culture and reputation in the marketplace. Think of it as marketing for the people side of the business. With social media, employment branding often becomes a candidate’s first impression.
  • Candidate audiences: Part of your talent strategy is to define and understand your target audience, the talent pool from which you source candidates. You might adjust your branding and sourcing outreach to a particular audience. But you have to know who you are talking to first.
  • Candidate relationship management includes the steps you take to offer a positive candidate experience and build relationships with people and audiences who might be candidates someday in the future.
  • Metrics and Analysis. You get what you measure, right, so talent acquisition concepts include some way of knowing if you are making progress to drive better recruitment decisions and improve the quality of hire.

These core elements have tactics and activities just like recruitment. Recruitment might be the element of talent acquisition you are most familiar with but talent acquisition is the strategic initiative that makes your business grow.

CEOs worry about talent. Talent acquisition and development routinely rates as the top 1 or 2 things CEOs worry about. They build business plans around having the right talent in the right place at the right time to accomplish business goals!

This is particularly critical in small to medium sized businesses leveraging fewer employees to accomplish your goals. Every team member has a critical role. A bad hire is an even bigger problem than in a larger business where one or two bad apples might be able to hide in the bureaucracy.

Make the most of your people assets by going beyond recruitment to think strategically about talent in support of your strategic business plans.

To view this video, or to view other videos featuring other strategic job search tips and tools from The Interview Doctor click here.

Filling Jobs: The Hiring Manager’s Point of View

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Let us consider an open position from the hiring managers’ point of view. There are likely two main reasons a position is open:

how to hire better

  1. Someone on the team left the job through termination, promotion, or resignation.
  2. Work is so plentiful that a new person has been approved to be added to the team.

In both situations, there is more work to be done than people to do the work. Someone, likely the hiring manager, must absorb the extra work. This creates a problem for the hiring manager.

Hiring takes a lot of time. You have to find candidates, shuffle through resumes and phone screen, pick a few people to interview, and find people to help you interview, schedule the interview, and then hope you pick the right candidate

All the while you are working on short term priorities just to keep up. Sometimes it feels like bailing a sinking boat. Short term priorities at the expense of long term results.

When you are standing on the sidelines it seems obvious that the hiring manager should focus on the job search. I want to shout, “Please participate in your own rescue and prioritize the recruiting process.”

But it is hard to let go of the extra work long enough to prioritize the hiring process.

Then there is paperwork. You have to make sure you have the right forms filled out, check references, and put together an offer. You have to get the proper approval at the beginning, middle, and end of the process.

Even when the right candidate is found for the right position that needs to be filled, sometimes it takes time to order the right tools and make sure the work area is set up to accommodate the new hire.

This is a lot of hassle. All the while the work piles up, everyone in the department, including the hiring manager, is overloaded trying to achieve the department goals while shorthanded.

Even if everything goes smoothly according to plan, the hiring manager often wonders if the candidate represents the correct choice. Will this person fit into the team? Will the person perform as advertised? Are we making a mistake by hiring this person?

Feel sorry for the poor hiring manager. The only way a hiring manager gets any resolution to this problem is to find a replacement for the person who left or fill the open position to handle the extra work.

Hiring is an awful experience. No one is happy. The short-handed team is overwhelmed and the candidates think they are being ignored.

What can you do about this situation?

• Hiring managers: Prioritize the hiring process. It is the only way out. Do it quickly and thoroughly so you hire the right person to complete the critical success factors that will make you look good.
• Candidates: Be prepared. Make sure your marketing materials (resume, LinkedIn pages, and whatever you plan to say while networking and interviewing) demonstrate that you can be successful in this job. That way you stand out and hiring managers will notice you.

Let me know if we can help! The Interview Doctor can help companies and candidates make a better match!

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