Making Better Recruitment Decisions
Companies invest over two-thirds of their resources in labor. Virtually every milestone attained by any company is to a large extent related to the human element of the organization. This makes it even more critical to evaluate, recruit, and hire the best workforce necessary to build a corporation’s brand.
Are the best people selected? Not always. Factors like human oversight can affect hiring decisions for your firm, both in recruiting new people and managing them once they come on board.
The staffing and recruiting industry have different methods for making smart hiring decisions. Some have proved very efficient, but others are stale.
Methods of Recruiting and Staffing
Quantitative vs. Interview
There are several methods of recruiting and staffing: employee referral programs, mobile recruiting, social recruiting, and more. There is also the quantitative method. With this unique method, recruiters evaluate the skills of a particular candidate based on his or her proficiency level, expertise, and relevant experience on the job rather than limiting the candidate to his or her performance on the interview.
The quantitative method of recruiting is more focused on records than interview outcomes. It evaluates based on the comparative advantage a particular candidate would have for an organization. This method can improve companies’ interview hit rates and make their investment in human capital more profitable.
Companies whose recruitment approach is based heavily on the interview outcome often discover shortcomings with the candidate’s performance on the job. This can be simply due to interviewer bias. Many industrial psychologists estimate the chances of an interview process fetching the best candidate to be as low as 20 percent. To be more objective, recruiters should subject all candidates to a similar interview exercise with a standard set of questions. That way, recruiters can quantitatively score candidates’ performance.
Another element that can improve the recruitment process is detection theory—a means to filter information from noise. Ben Dattner expounded the importance of this in an article titled “A Scorecard for Making Better Hiring Decisions.” He notes that when hired candidates excel, interviewers never get to revisit the process they used to make these successful selections. Hence these patterns can’t be repeated and improved. And if a candidate didn’t get the job, or doesn’t perform well after hiring, nobody wants to associate with failure. Because the recruiters don’t review the routines that made the mistakes, those mistakes are repeated.
It is vital that recruiters follow up on those who don’t get hired. Sometimes these missed opportunities can cost a company a lot, such as when the person becomes successful somewhere else. A great example of this is Jan Koum, who did not get hired at Facebook and then went on to develop his startup, WhatsApp—which he later sold to Facebook for $19 billion.
Recruiters can improve their success rates by making the recruitment process more quantitative, instead of subjective, and by following up on candidates who did—and did not—work out.
Written by Nels Cephas, Sourcer and Social Media Specialist, at Vector Talent Resources. For more information about how Vector can help you, contact Nels at nels@vectortalent.comor call us at 703.639.2160.
