Every employer will agree that getting the right people into the business is of fundamentally critical importance, but most will also find that doing so is easier said than done. And what’s the price of getting it wrong? Gaps in the team structure resulting in increased workload for existing staff, lost opportunity, overtime costs, quality issues, reputational damage, not to mention the time and cost involved in handling the associated people issues and repeating the recruitment exercise.
So how can employers get recruitment decisions consistently right? Is getting recruitment decisions right a skill or an art? We believe that it’s actually a bit of both and it starts with good planning and avoiding the risk of rushing recruitment exercises. Having well-developed and accurate Job Descriptions in place will help, meaning when the business is in recruitment-mode there are detailed documents available on which to base the design of the recruitment advert.
The recruitment advert will need to be compelling and include the pay and benefits associated with the role in order to attract a high volume of relevant candidates. Including a narrative outlining the current circumstances and future plans for the business is a good place to start. Adding a detailed description of the duties and scope of the role as well as personal attributes (e.g. qualifications, experience, personal skills etc) that a candidate will need to demonstrate to be successful with their application is also crucially important.
The next vital step is to develop and implement a marketing plan for the role, with the aim of ensuring that the vacancy is visible to the volume and type of candidates that the business is looking to attract. Such a marketing plan will very often involve more than simply placing the advert on Indeed!
As applications begin to filter through, it’ll become necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff. The initial sift should involve determining what the non-negotiables are in terms of the requirements of the person and the role and not compromising during the on-paper assessment of candidates. If you’re not attracting enough of the right type of candidates at this stage, then it’s probably the marketing plan that’s in need of review (as opposed to the sift criteria).
Once the short list has been developed, the next stage for employers will involve carrying out a technical interview. Though training around recruitment skills will clearly help, a technically experienced and expert individual will normally know what good looks like from a technical perspective during an interview. But can the same be said of cultural fit?
At Transitional HR our experience is that it’s impossible to establish how aligned an individual’s behavioural characteristics are with the values of a business and the behavioural requirements of a role during an interview. We therefore recommend that candidates who do well during a technical interview are required to complete a valid personality profiling assessment, which is essential in order to accurately determine the degree of cultural fit.
Finally, our advice is then to carry out a second interview where appropriate using the meeting as an opportunity to mop up any outstanding items from the technical interview and to discuss the outcomes of the personality profiling assessment.
Though there are no absolute guarantees, approaching the process of recruitment & selection in this way will vastly increase the probability of getting recruitment decisions consistently right and avoid all of the time, cost and trouble associated with the alternative outcome. At Transitional HR we have developed significant expertise in this business-critical area, and can be contacted here should any employer wish to have an initial conversation on this topic.
