It’s been a wild year for all, especially those of us in the Talent or Recruiting space, which has gone from one extreme to the other. We’ve seen companies desperate to hire a few months ago, now putting open positions “on hold” or even going through a reduction in force or layoff. How is this shift impacting your company? Are you finding it easier to hire or that the challenge in hiring has simply changed?
As the candidate markets shifts, recent history has shown that the work required to hire and onboard, changes with it. More candidates in your application pool may mean you reduce your job posting budget, but you may now need to increase the time spent screening and vetting candidates, which creates different challenges for your hiring team. Either way, ensuring that you have a solid, efficient and effective recruitment process remains the same. The ultimate goal of your recruitment function is to help you hire the best talent, regardless of external market conditions.
It’s not only about “recruiting”, it’s also about strategy, branding, having the best candidate experience and ultimately, the best process to enable you to hire and onboard new talent. How do you ensure success during these market shifts…our recommendation is to conduct a Recruitment Audit.
What is a Recruitment Audit?
A Recruiting Audit is a comprehensive analysis of your hiring process: the strategy, procedures, techniques, practices, methodologies, tools, systems, and messaging. It measures your ability to attract talent, move them through your hiring process to ultimately onboard and retain quality employees.
Why Would I Need a Recruitment Audit, now?
Like any other process, breakdowns can happen. It’s important to periodically check all aspects to ensure an optimal process and high caliber experience for both your candidates and team. A recruitment audit can shed light on things like:
- Outdated application process
- Candidate source & the ROI
- Time to fill
- Interviewing roadblocks
- Onboarding challenges
- Employee reviews & referral success
How Does It Work?
Again, if you think about recruiting as a process and not a periodic event, there are many areas that should be evaluated. Essentially, they fall into three categories:
- People
- Processes
- Systems
Let’s take a look at them individually.
People
In today’s environment, it’s all about making connections and providing meaningful experiences for your candidates. That starts with Employer Branding. What is your Employee Value Proposition? What do your reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed say about your company? Do you have a compelling and attractive company profile on Glassdoor or Indeed?
Candidates today are focused on more than compensation. They want to identify with your mission and core values. Communicating your company values and providing insights into your organization via social media creates credibility and enables candidates who align with your culture to seek you out. When you hire candidates aligned with your values and culture, you have better hiring success, higher employee satisfaction and reduced turnover.
How about the way you communicate with applicants? Is it respectful? Timely? Informative? Are you communicating with unqualified or rejected candidates? If you wonder why so many candidates are ghosting employers lately, it’s probably because they have been ghosted by potential employers one too many times. Don’t be like that, even an automated response when the candidate status is changed can be made personal and build your brand.
So when we talk about the People component of a Recruitment Audit, it can include:
- Employer Branding, Messaging & Social Media Management
- The Candidate Experience
- Sourcing & Referrals
- The Hiring Manager Experience
Process
Hiring is hard and it’s time-consuming. If you don’t do it right, you can either hire the wrong person or lose the right person in the process.
Think of your hiring process as a journey – with a starting and end point. It starts with a job description or job posting. Have you looked at your postings lately? Be honest – are they out of date? Are the requirements realistic? Have you run them through a gender decoder?
Interviews are the midpoint and a critical piece of the process. In all likelihood, your managers could use a refresher on best practices. A lot has changed in the last couple of years. You want to ensure they are asking the kinds of questions that determine if someone will succeed in the role and if they fit the company culture. There are a lot of very talented people out there, but someone who is a star somewhere else may not necessarily perform the same way in your organization. The key to making that determination is knowing what questions to ask and how to interpret the candidate’s answers.
What is the endpoint of the hiring process? If you answered “a signed offer letter,” you need to catch up to the 21st century. The endpoint (if there is one) is your onboarding process. In a 2019 study by Gallup, only 12% of employees thought their employers did a great job of onboarding new employees. This means 88% didn’t think their onboarding experience was all that terrific. If you want to reduce turnover, you need a stellar onboarding process.
A standardized process ensures both candidates and hiring managers are clear on expectations and all the steps between your starting point and endpoint. Auditing your Process components can make sure your hiring team is on the same page when it comes to:
- Acceptable Job Gaps
- Pre-Screening Evaluations
- Interview Cadence
- Interview Questions
- Background Check Requirements
- Offer Letters
Systems
Systems. Tech. Platforms. Integrations. There is an endless list of “solutions” to make your recruiting and hiring process easier and more efficient. But those solutions only work if you know how to use them and maximize their functionality. The number one benefit is that of automation. There are multiple activities that once could only be done manually:
- New applicant acknowledgment
- Resume sharing
- Candidate communication
- Interview scheduling
Create a template once, and forever respond to anyone that applies to one of your job postings without lifting a finger. For example, set up self-scheduling by candidates or share interview notes across the hiring team without composing an email.
Not only do these features streamline your internal processes, but they also make the candidate experience better! In a highly competitive market like this, you want to be the employer who provides timely, professional communication.
Do you know all the features and functionality your system offers? Have you created efficiencies throughout the hiring process?
Moving Forward with a Recruitment Audit
A Recruitment Audit can help improve not just your recruiting practices but your entire hiring process. Audits translate into making better hires, ramping up hires more quickly, reducing turnover, and, ultimately, improving your organization’s level of success.
If you’d like to know how to get started, you can reach out to us for help! Schedule a free discovery call to learn more.
