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3 Antiquated Hiring Tools and How to Uplevel Them for 2023

The past few years brought many changes to recruiting. If you can talk to other recruiters and hiring managers, they’ll no doubt say the same thing: It is much harder to hire quality talent than ever. The pandemic and the Great Resignation have both contributed to this. Still, the number one reason for these changes is that too many workplaces are not anticipating and delivering what employees want out of a workplace, beginning with the hiring process itself.

For many recruiters and hiring managers, taking a hard look at your hiring processes isn’t easy. We’ve relied on many hiring processes and procedures for decades or longer. As diversity, sustainability, and financial considerations become significant factors for businesses and employees, and these antiquated hiring tools need to adapt and uplevel to meet the need for hiring in the modern labor market.

Three standard tools used during the hiring process have become more of a hindrance to a successful hiring process than help. With a few tweaks, however, these tools can be upleveled to improve the hiring process and promote diversity and growth within your workforce.

1. Job Descriptions

Upleveling your hiring process begins with your job description. Whether that description is in an advertisement on a job site or front and center on your company’s website, it is a critical tool that communicates to job candidates what the available role requires. Many job descriptions only include a list of hard skills, including education, experience, and training requirements, with no indication of the soft skills, qualities, and strengths that are key for a successful candidate.

Language and terms that were standard years ago are, at best, ineffective and, at worse, damaging in today’s job market. To uplevel your job descriptions, start by looking at the role and considering the necessary strengths. This includes both hard and soft skills. Also, ensure that the soft skills are not relegated to the end of the description. By keeping the skills balanced throughout, more prospective candidates stay engaged with the job description and apply.

Finally, inclusion and diversity are essential to your company’s culture, beginning with the job description. Review your description for any terms or elements of structure that exclude workers by gender, race, orientation, or ability.

2. Resumes

Resumes are still the most used tool for hiring, bringing all the candidate’s qualifications and experience together on one page. Unfortunately, traditional resumes are not very good at predicting success in a job since they depend on educational background and experience that underrepresented candidates may not have been able to access.

Using resumes to evaluate candidates, especially early in recruitment, increases the risk of bias entering the process. Recruiters and hiring managers may unintentionally look for education and background experience that is similar to their own or that impress rather than looking for softer skills and qualifications.

The value of a resume varies from industry to industry and role to role. Begin by determining which data on the resume is helpful for your hiring purposes and how you can better access it quickly and efficiently. You could ask candidates to select a list of their skills and strengths at the start of the application. Another option may be to ask candidates for a short video interview, allowing them to be creative and share their unique stories and motivations.

3. Traditional Job Interviews

Like traditional resumes, job interviews are not good at predicting candidates’ suitability for a job. An interview’s unstructured, conversational feel can increase the potential for bias, leading recruiters to unintentionally ask specific questions to candidates they feel connected to and not ask those questions of others.

Upleveling your interview process includes having a set of standard role-oriented questions you ask every candidate. There should also be a standard for grading interviews, with candidate responses scored using the same grading criteria. This ensures that each candidate has a fair experience during the interview process.

Conclusion

As 2022 ends and we prepare to enter a new year, the need to reimagine how we recruit and hire new employees has become urgent. It is no longer enough to attract new talent with the allure of perks; we need to focus on the relationship between the worker and the work and adapt our methods for sourcing, hiring, developing, and retaining quality talent.

In a post-pandemic world, antiquated hiring tools must evolve and adapt to a new world or be left behind. By embracing change and innovation, we can bring old hiring tools into the future, mitigating bias, increasing diversity, and building a stronger workforce that allows our businesses to grow and progress.

If overhauling your hiring process overwhelms you, consider partnering with a staffing firm like Vector Talent. The experienced recruiters of Vector Talent understand the new dynamics of recruitment and can help your hiring process adapt efficiently, saving you time and money.

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