The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Ideal Hiring Process
Hiring is the one thing that sets the stage for everything else that's good or bad in an organization. Great hiring leads to productivity, engagement, innovation, and retention and poor hiring does the opposite. Great hiring starts with a great hiring process. In this new guide we'll cover many aspects of building your ideal hiring process. Some of the things covered include:
- The business case for a better hiring process
- The components of a great hiring process
- The biggest challenge and how over come them
Download the guide today or read the web version below.
Contents
The Importance of the Hiring Process
Build a Better Hiring Process
Solving the Challenges of Building a Great Hiring Process
1. The Need to Invest in Better Hiring
Hiring is the one thing that sets the stage for everything else in business. It’s the foundation of, or predecessor to, all other good things … and potentially bad things in an organization. It determines how innovative a company and its products will be. It determines how fast those products can be brought to market. It determines the strength of customer service.
Hiring is the cause of everything in an organization; all other things are the result.
When hiring goes right, everything is more successful: sales, customer service, marketing, finance, and operations. Companies are more innovative. They have a better reputation and attract better talent. They bring products to market faster and make more money.
Despite that, it gets shortchanged. Amazingly, hiring often gets deprioritized and deemphasized.
Typical job interviews, for example, have been deemed to be about as effective in making a hiring decision as the flip of a coin.
Turnover is ridiculously high at many organizations, a result of poor hiring practices in many cases. Alarms would sound if customers turned over as often as employees do, but sky-high turnover is often brushed off as “the way it always has been.”
We worked with one customer in a high-volume warehouse. They have about 12,000 agents and spend about $800,000 a year on hiring. The customer estimates that turnover costs the company about $40 million annually.
The $800,000 in hiring costs was nothing when compared to the cost of turnover. Yet so many companies turn cartwheels to achieve minor reductions in hiring costs while never making needed improvements to their hiring process that can produce results on the order of millions.
John Sullivan, San Francisco State University professor, notes that:
"Large corporations have thousands of business processes, but I doubt that you’ve ever heard of a single process that has a 50 percent failure rate. Your firm’s executives will be shocked to learn that the recruiting process, the HR process with the highest business impact, often has a failure rate of 50 percent.
And that astonishing failure rate occurs at every job level, from hourly employees, to managers, and even at the executive level. You don’t have to be a CFO to calculate the tremendous dollar costs, negative business impacts, and the lost productivity that results from each and every hiring failure. Assume for a minute that you are a corporate executive and then consider what your response would be when you were presented with the following revealing table.
If you understand Six Sigma, you know that in layman’s terms it means that a little higher than three errors occur per million tries. The failure rate in these five job level areas ranges from a low of 40 percent and a high of 82 percent, or an average of 500,000 errors per million hires.”
2. The Business Case for A Better Hiring Process
The cost of a poor hiring process has been widely documented. To take one example, Virgin Media once realized that its poor candidate experience alone, which resulted in unhappy candidates who are also unhappy customers, cost the company more than $5 million annually.
Direct turnover costs are just the tip of the poor hiring iceberg. The direct costs of replacing someone may run about 30 percent of a salary. The actual cost of turnover by many studies has been shown to go above and beyond that to 100 to 200 percent of an employee’s annual salary. In a call center, for example, this includes the intangible costs of turnover, like the impact low-tenured agents have on your customers and the experience they’re having if employees are untrained or they’re still ramping up.
There’s the impact on your brand, of course. Your people are the face and the voice of your brand and your company. There’s also the influence that one person’s departure has on other workers. Research has found that when one employee turns over, other employees who might not have thought about leaving begin to think about quitting – a domino effect. And then, of course, there’s the impact on supervisors and leadership, such as pulling them into multiple hiring conversations. And there are costs that are hidden in other departments when a call-center employee leaves.
The benefit of a “good hire” is just as important. John Sullivan, one of the leading voices in quantifying the impact of recruiting, writes:
“Calculating the cost of recruiting in isolation often has the net effect of forcing recruiters to primarily worry about the cost of hiring (which may average $5,000) even though the business impacts that the new hire produces may be many many times higher (at Apple for example, they exceed $2.2 million per year for each hire).”
While not every employee exceeds millions of dollars in production, a quality hire does exponentially exceed the value of a poor one. A “bad hire” could easily leave in one or two months, and a quality hire may stay 5, 10, or 20 times that long. In that initial month, the “bad hire” is not at full productivity. They are onboarding, learning, requiring training time from coworkers, and so on. The opportunity cost of not having a good hire in place is enormous. Despite the importance of quality of hire, the business world has long focused on the cost per hire.
Sullivan writes:
”Cost per hire is an evil metric because calculating it takes up time and resources away from measuring the quality of hires. For example, if you required brain surgery, you would certainly be concerned about the cost of the surgery, but the cost element would be of minimal concern compared to the value of the output – living and having a fruitful life. In every other part of the business, managers never look just at costs. You instead compare the costs to the value of the output or the result that those expenditures produce.”
3. Talent Acquisition - Leading the Way
Logic dictates that if hiring is so vital, and talent acquisition has a critical role in hiring, talent acquisition is of supreme importance to an organization.
While this seems obvious, talent acquisition is sometimes wrongly considered a “cost center” or brushed off as a “back-end” line item in a corporate budget, the first to cut when budgets are tight.
Talent acquisition’s role is appreciated in at least one industry, sports – where the impact of talent is most obvious. Talented ballplayers are coveted and paid well, and the importance of quality of hire is glaring. In this industry, those involved in talent – the scouts, the player-personnel VP, and the rest of what could be considered the “talent-acquisition” team – are often the rockstars of the organization’s non-athlete employees.
This should be the case in every industry.
Talent acquisition’s opportunity and challenge is much bigger than it once was. Among the reasons:
- Skills shortages and demographic changes have increased due to the aging of the population, immigration policies, fertility rates, and other factors.
- Employees have different work expectations than their parents and grandparents; they are more concerned about their well being, about a company’s mission, and about flexibility.
- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued new human capital disclosure rules, meaning companies have to release talent-related information that is critical to its shareholders.
- Industries are all transforming (such as healthcare embracing telehealth; clothing becoming more casual; restaurants delivering food; energy shifting to alternatives, and so on). This is continually shifting every company’s skills needs, and making it more important to find people who are adaptable and eager to learn.
A well-designed hiring process is crucial to not only attracting and selecting the right candidates, but also enhances the employer brand and improves overall employee retention.
Some of the components you’ll need to get started include:
Clear Job Descriptions
Job descriptions should detail the specific tasks and responsibilities needed to do the job. They should specify the necessary skills, education, and experience. And, they should communicate the company’s mission, values, and work environment. The most important thing is to include what’s necessary to do the job, and exclude what is unnecessary. For example, a requirement that someone needs a college degree may be unnecessary, depending on the job. Similarly, requirements that a person have a certain number of years of experience should be backed by solid reasoning and data.
Effective Sourcing Strategies
Depending on the job, this includes postings on job boards, social media, and professional networks. Employee referrals are often a top source of candidates. Agencies, staffing firms, and headhunters can help with specialized or high-level positions. External recruiters, however, should be well versed in your data-driven hiring approach, interview questions, and other aspects of your process so that there is consistency regardless of who’s doing the recruiting.
Streamlined Application Process
How candidates will apply and be considered for a position can make or break your hiring process. Make the application process easy and quick with user-friendly application forms. Send immediate, automated confirmations upon receiving applications.
This involves a balance. Long processes can turn candidates off. Overly short applications may produce such a deluge of applicants that you won’t be able to filter the best candidates quickly, and might miss them.
Look at your application completion rates to measure if you are achieving this balance. If completion rates are too low, for example, consider making the process shorter or easier. You can look at where people are dropping off in the application, and time spent in the application step. Always keep the candidate experience in mind: the application is not simply a way for the company to filter and receive job applications; it also is the job candidate’s first impression of your organization.
Screening and Shortlisting
Use automated screening tools to filter resumes based on keywords and criteria. Conduct brief, initial phone screens to assess candidates’ basic qualifications and interest. Be sure you aren’t wasting valuable time by asking screening questions that could have been handled by software.
Structured Interviews
Prepare consistent questions for all candidates to ensure fairness. Use behavioral and situational questions that focus on past behavior, and/or hypothetical scenarios to gauge skills and cultural fit. (Example: “Tell me about a time you dealt with an angry customer.”)
Panel Interviews
Include multiple interviewers to get diverse perspectives, but make sure you’re not wasting people-hours by including people who don’t need to be there.
Skills Assessment
Practical tests can be used to give candidates relevant tasks or projects and evaluate candidates’ abilities. For senior roles, consider assessment centers to test a range of skills.
Candidate Experience
Communicate to candidates throughout the process. Treat all candidates with respect and professionalism. Provide constructive feedback to unsuccessful candidates.
Background and Reference Checks
Verify credentials such as education, certifications, and previous employment. Conduct reference checks of former employers or colleagues.
Decision-making and Offers
Involve all stakeholders in the final, collaborative decision. Present offers that are attractive and competitive in the market. There should be no surprises by the time of the offer; you should have a sense of whether the candidate wants the job and would be likely to accept it.
Continuous Improvement
Gather feedback from candidates and hiring managers to identify areas for improvement. Consider administering a survey to candidates who are hired, as well as those who are not, to get feedback on how the hiring process went. In many cases, these employees could make great future hires, referrals to other potential candidates, and customers for your business. Treat every candidate, hired or not, like a customer.
Data Analysis
Use hiring metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the process and make data-driven adjustments. We’ve talked to companies that have implemented human-resources technologies and check on their metrics every few months! If you don’t evaluate the effectiveness of your hiring process, it will deteriorate. This will be covered later in this guide, but a hiring process that works for one job today may need adjustment a year from now as that job changes. Reviewing the valuable data on your hiring process should be a daily event. Every company has a lot of such data, but most don’t make use of it; by doing so you get a competitive recruiting edge.
Your goal as a talent acquisition leader is to use these steps to build the process that is right for your organization and the roles you hire for. It’s not always easy, as there are significant challenges to creating a great hiring process. Every one of them can be overcome, something we’ll talk about next.
Solving the Challenges of Building a Great Hiring Process
When it comes to building a great hiring process, there are many challenges. Here are some of the biggest obstacles.
- Balancing the need for speed with the desire for quality
- Balancing technology with the human touch
- Having the data necessary for intelligent decision making
- Being flexible to adapt to changes in your talent/labor needs
Let’s look at those challenges one by one and how they can be overcome.
5. Balancing Speed and Quality
The first challenge is to reduce time to hire while achieving the “holy grail” of recruiting: quality of hire. There are a wide variety of ways to measure quality, differing by organization. Some companies use manager satisfaction ratings; others use performance reviews; others simply measure quality by tenure; still others use more complex formulas combining multiple variables.
A simple way of summing up hire quality is an employee’s ability to do their job; the employee staying at the job long enough to matter; and the employee fitting or adding to the company’s culture. (The latter is a measure of such things as helping others around them perform better.)
Many companies merely consider a “quality hire” to be one who is difficult to lure, even if that person leaves the job shortly after taking the job. Unless it was a person hired to be a Santa Claus at the shopping mall on December 20, an amazing employee who leaves after a week should not typically be considered a quality hire.
Quality is the most important measure of hiring success, but it is the measure that organizations do the least to fix.
At his recent keynote at a Society for Human Resource Management Talent conference, Tim Sackett, author of The Talent Fix: A Leader’s Guide to Recruiting Great Talent, asked the audience of about 3,000 people how many of their organizations tracked their time to hire. Most all raised their hands. He then asked how many tracked the quality of hire. Maybe 5 percent raised their hands.
Surely, these attendees care about the quality of hire, one of the most important outcomes in all of human resources. However, they may not have found a way to use data that enables them to measure and improve quality at their unique organization for their unique jobs.
Some high-volume call centers, warehouses, and other workplaces have 50 percent turnover (a clear sign hiring is not working) but throw time and money at the wrong solutions to the problem. They might, for example, put most of their efforts into trying to improve the workplace. While this is well intentioned, it does not address the root cause of turnover: hiring people who were highly likely to not want to stay in the job, regardless of any minor changes made to working conditions.
Steven Hunt, author of Hiring Success: The Art and Science of Staffing Assessment and Employee Selection and one of the leading experts on high-volume hiring, likens this to a turtle balancing on a fencepost. “If the turtle falls off the fencepost,” Hunt says, “it’s not the turtle’s fault. It’s the person who put it there.”
Another way of looking at quality is by renaming it “accuracy.” Quality suggests “good or bad” or “better or worse.” Particularly for jobs in call centers, warehouses, or jobs that have a lot of manual labor or repetition, it’s really about finding the right person who can succeed in that particular job.
Wes Sutkin, who made multiple improvements to the hiring process as a talent-acquisition leader at Dr. Pepper, says that at Dr. Pepper:
“We quit interviewing for skills and interviewed for ‘who wants to do this?’ We don’t want people to say ‘yes’ to the job unless this is what they want to do. It’s a physical, hard job. A lot of people can do these jobs. You can teach these warehouse roles. The real question is, ‘Is there a reason this work fits your life and lifestyle?’ If so, the chances of retaining someone go up instantly. I found the ones who loved the work, they were like artists. They got satisfaction out of it, and didn’t want to leave.”
Many hiring systems help you hire fast, and a few help with quality. Few help you optimize both speed and quality in a way that’s adaptable to whatever unique constraints an organization may face, which is critical for building the ideal hiring process.
Regarding the speed of hire, there has certainly been “progress” here. But the progress has just been in making hiring faster, not better. If your only goal is to get someone in a chair or truck to start the job, without regard to quality, the entire process should be automated. There should be no human intervention.
There are some very large retailers that are trying just that! They quickly hire someone with little to no human involvement using texting, chatbots, online scheduling, and online screening. Large numbers of people are hired quickly. People are not screened out for turnover. Many quit, and large numbers are continually hired again. The turnover costs millions of dollars. The technology could be gathering data, learning from each hire, and then adjusting the hiring process, but that isn’t usually happening. The focus is on time, not quality.
Quality without speed is not desirable either; it also is a bit of an oxymoron. A long hiring process with multiple interviews and lengthy decision-making results in top candidates bailing out and finding a job elsewhere. The job is open too long and turnover is made even worse. It isn’t “quality without speed” because it isn’t quality at all. It would result in so much time trying to make a “quality hire” that fewer and fewer candidates would receive any communication at all.
Tips for Balancing Hiring Speed with Quality
The speed-quality challenge described above is fixable. People can be hired swiftly while preserving quality of hire. Here are five suggestions for improving and fine-tuning the balance between speed and quality.
1. Know the job you’re hiring for
For some jobs, like a Doctor, CEO, or machine operator, quality is much more important than speed. If you weigh your speed-quality spectrum too far in the direction of speed, it can have substantial negative consequences for that job. For other jobs, like customer support representative, where you have lots of positions to fill quickly and if you make a bad hire the consequences aren’t as large, you might decide to prioritize speed.
2. Build a hiring plan based on No. 1
Once you know the importance of both how fast you need to hire for the role, and the degree of importance of quality, build a plan that mirrors those requirements. If you have to hire fast, make the applicant process shorter and don’t screen out too many people. If quality is super important, create a longer process with more screening and interviews to make sure you get it right. Each job is different, so modify your process for every position.
3. Train the rest of your team on the plan
Make sure recruiters and hiring managers know the hiring plan and the relative importance of hiring fast to get the job filled versus getting the right people.
4. Track both speed and quality to know how you’re doing
Some people say “it takes forever to hire someone for this position,” when it takes about a month. To them, it might feel like forever because they need to hire someone in 15 days. Without a time-related goal and data on the actual hiring time, you won’t know where you stand. The same goes for quality. If a hiring manager complains about hiring “bad employees,” chances are you aren’t putting enough emphasis on the quality side of speed vs. quality. By tracking the three quality-of-hire components (performance, cultural fit/add, and how tenure) you will know if you’re properly balancing speed and quality.
5. Always be improving
Adjust your hiring process as needed to increase or decrease speed, and increase or decrease quality. If your time to hire, for example, is 36 days and needs to be 15 days, but your quality is very high, you might consider streamlining your screening process or automating some of the time-related components to make it faster, even if you sacrifice some quality.
6. Balancing Technology and the Human Touch
The second challenge to the ideal hiring process is balancing how much of your process should be technology driven vs. human driven. Technology is better at some things, and humans are better at other things. Both need to be used responsibly for what they are best at, to deliver quality hires in a given time frame.
A chatbot, texting application, or website that handles the entire hiring process could turn off some candidates, especially top candidates.
But a hiring process that is 100 percent manual with nothing but human intervention is equally flawed. It is costly. It is unscalable.
Think about a doctor’s office, where hundreds of patients are seen annually for checkups. It’s nice to have a lot of time with the doctor, getting questions answered and not being rushed. But if each patient spent, say, 90 minutes at their annual checkup chatting with the doctor, the doctor would likely have insufficient hours in the day for all the necessary checkups, it would be tough to schedule an appointment, and much of the intended high-touch experience of this 90-minute checkup plan would be lost.
The challenge is to strike this balance between this human-free, chatbot process and the untenable quality-only one.
Tips for Balancing Technology and the Human Touch
Again, this is a solvable challenge. Here are suggestions as you decide where to use technology and where to leverage that human touch in your hiring process.
1. Rank the importance of all the activities your team is doing
Start by identifying how the recruiting team is spending its days. From phone calls, to emails, to filling out forms, document the journey, and rank the importance of each of the activities. There are likely some activities you would all agree are more important than others. Look to find technology solutions for the low-value items.
2. Identify repetitive tasks
What parts of the process are the same every time? These are prime targets for technology and automation. If, for example, on your phone screen the recruiter always asks the candidate’s salary expectations and expected start date, this likely could be automated.
3. Evaluate time-consuming activities
Are there certain areas that just take a lot of time? See if they are high-value or low-value tasks. If they are low value, look for ways to automate.
4. Track the candidate experience
Candidate experience is very important to a great hiring process (remember earlier in this guide that dollar figure Virgin Airlines attributed to it!) and represents one of the first impressions a candidate has of your company. At times technology can give a great impression. Other times a human is better suited to make a candidate’s experience great. When you track the completion rates throughout the process, you’ll get a good idea of where the candidate experience is strong and weak. Look to make adjustments to your process in the weak areas. This can mean either adding more human interaction or sometimes even removing interaction if it delays the process. Talk with your recruiters and candidates to understand the best way to make adjustments.
All in all, an ideal hiring system uses technology to automate parts of the hiring process, like scheduling, that can make life easier for both the company and the candidate. But it doesn’t result in a new hire showing up at a new job without ever having talked to an employee of the company.
7. Using Data for Intelligent Decision-Making
The next challenge to an ideal hiring process revolves around data.
There have been some attempts to develop modern technologies to serve today’s high-volume hiring needs. For the most part, they unfortunately have been unimpressive. Some companies have tried to sell “hiring intelligence,” but it is often just analytics.
The issue is not about a lack of data in general. A number of prominent technology companies advertise the fact that they have millions of pieces of data about the labor market. This labor-market data is useful. However, we are reminded of the talent-technology company that used to tell its prospective customers, “there’s no data more precise than yours.”
Marketing departments act on data about their customers, found in systems like Hubspot and Marketo. Sales departments act on data found in Salesforce. Finance departments act on data, such as whether the company is running ahead or behind quarterly revenue and earnings targets. Talent-acquisition professionals now have the ability to monitor data in real time, and adjust. They can achieve a balance between speed and quality, and between technology and humanity. This can occur at a small fraction of the cost of the lost productivity occurring today due to outdated hiring practices. The challenge here is to be able to accurately gather this data about your hiring practices and outcomes, and to be able to analyze it to take action.
Tips for Intelligent Decision-Making
A truly modern system uses a data-driven suite for improved hiring outcomes, one aimed at making high-quality hires (again, defined by three things: doing the job, staying at the job, and adding to or fitting the culture).
This system should include:
- A data-driven system for screening, assessing, tracking, scoring, and interviewing applicants.
- Data showing which parts of the hiring process are ripe for automation and which should rely on humans.
- The ability to compare candidates objectively.
- The ability to modify hiring processes at any time, and the data and intelligence needed to do so.
Here are some examples of how companies are using this kind of data:
Example 1:
A retailer was administering an IQ test to potential cashiers. Though it may have been predictive of success at a given job in its organization, data did not show that the test correlated to a quality hire in this job at this company. Because of the availability of this data and the flexibility of the hiring suite, the test could easily be discontinued and the hiring process modified.
Example 2:
A retailer uncovered data about people who had been hired out of cashier jobs. It found that 65 percent of former cashiers stayed past 90 days, while only 48 percent of other employees did. The data-driven hiring process it was using allowed it to consider this experience in its screening process and give more attention to candidates with experience as a cashier.
Example 3:
One company, during the application process, tracked data on the desired hourly pay of workers. It would chart out who answered $14 to $16 all the way to who answered $20 to $22 an hour. The job paid $18 an hour. What it found was that these people whose desired pay was lower than what the job already actually paid came in with their expectations not only met but exceeded. The people with lower expectations, but not lower pay than their coworkers, had a higher 40 to 53 percent higher retention rate. This data on candidate expectations was valuable enough that the company could consider it in its modifiable hiring process.
Example 4:
A company realized that one of its interview questions did not serve a clear purpose, according to the data. It didn’t correlate positively or negatively to a quality hire. The customer removed the question from the screening process, saving time for the company and the candidate, ultimately improving speed without sacrificing quality.
This last example, of the interview question, sounds simple and obvious. But thousands of interviews take place in hundreds of organizations every single day, using questions which have no data-driven correlation to quality of hire. Companies lack the data on how its interview questions correlate to a successful employee, and find it difficult to modify their processes.
Your own organization’s data is the treasure-trove of data most powerful to a talent-acquisition department. We’ve found that a company’s own data is about three times more valuable than aggregate data because of an organization’s unique Key Performance Indicators, environment, tasks, competencies, and more.
8. Being Flexible and Adapting to Changes
The final challenge with achieving the ideal hiring process is flexibility. Many businesses are served by typically large, established applicant tracking systems from legacy companies. These solutions may appear comprehensive. They have cobbled-together solutions or gathered bolt-on partner products to appear to be all-in-one solutions for recruiting.
But, they are typically inflexible and dated in how they think about recruiting. They have not adapted to changing times, the potential of AI, and the power of sophisticated data technology.
“What modern ATSs are not designed to do well is process high-volume hourly applicants at scale and speed,” says Tim Sackett, long-time HR professional, author, and speaker.
Some examples of these “changing times” mentioned above include:
- A company growing fast and needing to hire a lot of people right now
- Candidates suddenly not completing applications at high rates causing recruiters to receive sufficient applicants
- People accepting offers at lower wages … or rejecting them, wanting higher pay
- Everyone wanting to work from home
- Mandatory in-office policies
Organizations also typically have little control over the systems they are buying off the shelf. They often require everyone to follow the same hiring process, such as a recruiter prescreen, a hiring manager interview, an interview with the manager’s manager, and perhaps an assessment. The systems don’t always accommodate the many variations of hiring necessary in a company.
The tools typically do not allow companies to 1) meet the unique needs of their organization as it compares to others, or 2) hire for the idiosyncrasies of jobs within an organization.
On this first point, a customer-service representative may need quite a different skill set from one store or call center to another. Hiring for a generic profile of a customer-service rep is not helpful to many companies. In one organization that consulted with us, call-center reps handle phone calls from people whose relatives are at the last two weeks of their lives. The competencies required in these employees are radically different from the requirements in someone helping a bank customer find a lost password.
On the second point, about jobs within an organization, take, for example, a call center with a variety of roles. Some jobs within the same department of the company require a lot of interaction with others. Others do not. Some jobs experience high turnover and others do not.
The challenge is to be able to tailor to your hiring process for all of these scenarios.
Tips for Becoming More Flexible
Modern technologies accommodate the variety of always-changing jobs within an organization. They allow organizations to modify their hiring processes as data shows that the process must change. They no longer need to be at the mercy of rigid, legacy systems.
Consider Best Buy’s “Geek Squad.” Perhaps, for the sake of argument, one year a given store is performing house calls and handling issues more often in person, but the next year the Geek Squad decides to just handle them in the store. The job titles of the employees may not change, but the skill sets required for the same job may be different.
Or think about an employee of a restaurant chain. They might see their job change as more and more people choose to call and pick up their food. Not that any customer wants low-quality food, but certainly speed takes on high importance for these roles handling calls for take-out food.
Or, perhaps in the call-center of a large bank, AI is taking over some of the tasks associated with the role. As HR Dive wrote, “Generative AI will result in fewer call center agents taking on more complicated work. Members of these smaller teams will need a combination of emotional intelligence and technological know-how. Next-generation call center work will require leaders to rethink their hiring and retention strategies.”
Indeed, the skills required in the call-center job are changing, as the easier calls are handled by the computer and the employee gets the thornier issues. The hiring process for that role will need to change to assess people for complex communication skills, empathy, and patience.
In all of these examples, an ideal hiring system can accommodate the changes in the nature of the jobs. To accommodate this reality, you should:
- Always keep recruiter-manager lines of communication open to discuss ways jobs are changing
- Use real-time data to always monitor if job-evaluation criteria that was working in the past is working now
- Keep in touch with employees, asking them how their job is changing, if they have the skills they need, and what skills they believe are critical in the job
- Monitor external labor-market data (such as your competitor’s job postings) to see how jobs are changing
- Make sure your job descriptions stay current and are frequently revisited
- Review your interview process to ensure the questions are still necessary and relevant to the skills needed now
- Regularly review your recruitment marketing (including but not limited to your career site) to ensure that it is appealing to the right audience and weaning out people without current, necessary skills (or the ability to learn them)
Conclusion
Creating the ideal hiring process requires a delicate balance between speed, quality, and flexibility. The process must be adaptable, using the right mix of technology and the human touch to ensure efficiency without sacrificing the personal connection that candidates value. Quality hires are not just about filling roles quickly but ensuring that the right people are in the right positions to contribute long-term to the organization’s success. By continuously analyzing data and adjusting for the evolving nature of work, companies can build a hiring process that attracts and retains top talent, positioning themselves for sustained growth and innovation. Ultimately, hiring is more than a transactional process—it’s a strategic investment in the future of the organization.
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