Poor employee selection can be the first step towards a lack of employee motivation, low performances, and high turnover rates, just to name a few. It’s no wonder organizations are trying to find the best ways to avoid such slip-ups and ultimately find the best person for the job.
Before starting, though, it would be useful to understand which recruitment error is more detrimental to your organization; hiring an applicant that should have been rejected, or rejecting one that should have been hired? The first could mean making a quick hire to fill a void, while the latter could be failing to see the person’s true potential<. These 5 tips will help significantly reduce the recruitment problems you are facing and strengthen your already keen selection skills to ensure optimum HR performance! Let’s get to it!
1. Start hiring internally
Many companies spend a lot of resources and time interviewing external candidates when they could be developing them from within.
Sometimes, an existing worker has what it takes to be successful in a different position where roles and responsibilities are more aligned with their true potential. This can give an employee the opportunity they crave to perform well at other challenging tasks and become a prospect for future development.
This approach also helps to keep present employees stimulated and shows that the organization is devoted to the growth of its workforce. Also, asking current employees for referrals (and offering compensations) is a way to use an internal and reputable source for networking.
In any case, keeping your current performing employees motivated and happy so that they don’t start looking elsewhere is an effective way to avoid recruitment problems, since you won’t be wasting money embarking on the grueling process of job posting and research to begin with.
2. Select based on strengths
Detecting someone’s true strengths, especially those that are aligned with the job at hand, can be more difficult than people expect.
This goes for both the interviewer and interviewee, as many lack self-awareness and do not spend enough time reflecting before answering a question during the interview. And even then, are they feeding the interviewer false information, or is their true potential coming across?
When people’s natural talents are associated with the tasks, responsibilities and work environment, recruitment problems diminish drastically because the organization is benefiting from their innate abilities. Companies can use a number of techniques, such as personality & psychometric tests in order to detect and build on these natural strengths, which can be less obvious in the interview process.
3. Be social media savvy
Social media trends such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are so popular in today’s culture and are becoming the go-to place for applicants to search for jobs, especially the younger generations.
Organizations are hopping on board this trend not only to attract more clients but to promote recruitment opportunities such as job fairs and listings. Having a social media platform can alleviate some recruitment problems as it can help a company expand their network system, detect the right cultural fit with job seekers, and make the process of looking for a job quicker and easily accessible.
Let’s not forget about the money that will be saved when organizations cut back on recruitment sites and services every time they need to post a job opening. In addition, posting job opportunities in social media usually creates this ripple effect as people forward or tag others in the post and sets a viral spread into motion. Oh the beauty of social networking!
Just be sure you have the resources available to screen and respond to the potentially sizable volume of applicants!
4. Keep it objective
It can be a common recruitment problem; you are interviewing a candidate and can’t help but have that optimistic (and sometimes misleading) first impression. To boot, the candidate starts to remind you of someone you know (or even yourself) and the positive feelings associated with that person start to occur.
The applicant’s outgoingness and approachable nature in the interview has a positive effect on you. You think to yourself “this person is great!” On the flip side, your fellow recruiter is in complete disagreement with you, disliked the candidate and can’t fully put their finger on why, but has a bad feeling about them. So who is right?
These interpretations may be driven by subjective biases which can cause one to hire someone based on exterior factors or feeling. Although utilizing your expertise and professional instincts is inevitable, recruitment should be rooted from some objective facts nonetheless.
Again, incorporating psychometrics can provide a common denominator between two people’s opinions and bring objectivity to the analysis.
5. Look beyond experience/background
Speaking of personality assessments, who would you choose; a candidate fresh out of university whose personality profile suggests that he is motivated, driven and built for a sales position, or, a candidate that has more experience in sales but who’s innate personality doesn’t match the competitive, results-oriented nature of such a position?
The downfall of the second option is that when a person goes against their natural reflexes, when they continuously swim against the current, they tend to slow down, change jobs, become de-motivated and can ultimately burnout. It can be easier and more rewarding to develop someone who is green but naturally built for a position than to pick someone who is in the wrong role to begin with.
The consideration of ones CV (i.e. previous experiences and background) is an important part of any recruitment process but should not be the only insight into a person’s competencies. This can cause recruitment problems as the candidate’s innate strengths and character traits can easily be overlooked.
Administering a psychometric test that evaluates one’s natural reflexes is an effective way to see if a person is actually built for a specific position, experienced or not.
To conclude, recruitment problems can happen to the most experienced recruiters, but there are strategies that can significantly reduce these errors in order for you to save time, money and energy.
Keeping up to date with trends, recognizing growth potential in your existing employees and utilizing a psychometric test to uncover natural strengths are ways to hire the best for the job and to ultimately enhance your human capital.