Changing recruitment practice to identify better people

If the truth be told, senior executive management is not that interested in the recruitment process. As far as recruitment goes, what the ‘C’ level care about is getting the right people at the right time and that they improve the performance of the business.

It follows that executive leaders are likely to get uncomfortable when good people leave. They may also get decidedly twitchy if they think that the quality of people that stay isn’t what they need to improve the performance of the business.

Many of you recruiters and recruitment leaders out there deserve our sympathies, because ‘twitchy’ sometimes expresses itself in the form of a Monday morning roasting from your boss!

With minds suitably focused, if we really think about it, one of the challenges is how we can change recruitment practice to identify better people.

What does ‘better people’ actually mean?

We’re all likely to have a good idea of the basic attributes that we find desirable in those we seek to hire. However, what determines whether one candidate is more desirable than another? In a nutshell, what does the term ‘better people’ actually mean?

It’s an important question, because this is at the heart of why enterprise recruitment may produce inconsistent results.

Enterprise recruitment measures a lot of things, however, they are not always that relevant. And some things that are measured are not linked, so the data fails to yield true context and recruitment intelligence.

The truth is, enterprise recruitment centers on measuring how well candidates perform at interview. And post-hire, the point of focus should be on measuring how well they perform on the job. In most organisations, if they are properly collected at all, these data sets are disconnected.

 

The real measure of a successful hire

The ability to really measure the success of a hire is to be able to map how actual performance in post compares to the expectations you had for the candidate when they were interviewed.

If you cannot link post hire performance to pre-hire expectation, then you simply have no meaningful indication of Hiring Quality. Without that you simply cannot unlock a process that improves consistency of hiring and helps to deliver truly better people to the enterprise to meet the demands of executive management.

For more on how to get a meaningful indication of Hiring Quality, see this ERE blog about recruitment technology firm Talenytics: ‘Quality Hire? Try Hiring Quality, Says One Startup’.

 

Technology, strategic recruitment practice,and Hiring Quality

Practically all aspects of enterprise operations are now being transformed by the latest technology solutions. The early generations of business computing were all about crunching numbers. Latterly, for recruiters, automation has eliminated many manual tasks through software such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). The latest generation is all about analytics, machine learning and AI.

As technology takes over more and more of the legwork, enterprise recruiters need to become more strategic if they are to continue to deliver value. Dr. John Sullivan has some great views on activities that focus recruiters on strategic practice. Moving forward, these are really going to be quite influential in continuing to raise the bar, for both recruiting better people and improving Hiring Quality.

It’s well worth taking a look at this Dr. John Sullivan blog: ‘The Future Of Recruiting Is An Internal Talent Consulting Group, As Technology Handles Daily Recruiting Tasks’