The end of the year is a great time to reflect on the previous year and evaluate your recruitment process, says Kari Rosand Scanlon, principal consultant with Spotlight HR Solutions.
How did it go for you as an individual recruiter, as someone who is part of an HR team or as a small business owner? There are a couple factors that can play into how you measure success or failure, says Scanlon.
“When you look back, you will likely have hired someone who just wasn’t a good fit,” says Scanlon.
That can come down one key aspect of hiring: Understanding how your hires fit your company culture.
“During the interview process, most hiring managers focus just on technical skills and assume the candidate will fit into the organization,” says Scanlon. “Instead, hiring managers should consider their company culture and discuss it with candidates.”
For example, does your staff work primarily alone or in teams? Then, ask questions to evaluate your candidate’s experiences. Keep asking your question until your candidate talks about an actual situation.
“Be mindful of candidates who report what they think they would do or what they would likely do,” says Scanlon.
You want to hire candidates who give concrete examples: “This is what has happened to me and this is what I did about it.”
Consider your questions ahead of time and write them down so you are consistent in each interview. It’s fine to have an open format for asking questions about work history, but give every candidate the opportunity to share how they fit into your culture, says Scanlon.
Even if you hit on that hot hire, a poorly planned or developed onboarding and orientation process can ruin the enthusiasm a new hire often brings to the job and can lead them to be doomed from the start.
Says Scanlon: “Many times hiring managers think ‘Whew. I’m done; and move on. While it’s great to have someone actually coming to work, it’s even better when that person is able to be up and running as fast as possible.”
Many small businesses don’t consider the onboarding and orientation process and let the new person learn about whatever is happening from day-to-day. Take the time to lay out a short orientation. Setup meetings for the new person to meet key staff and/or customers during the first few days of work. Assign them a buddy or mentor to help with common questions. This person should be available to answer questions that the new employee doesn’t want to ask a manager.
“Also, avoid giving the new employee lots of paperwork on the first day,” says Scanlon.
Try to break the day up between the paperwork and actual work. For example, the first day might be payroll and benefit forms and the second day might be the company manual.
“New employees are excited to learn about their jobs, so let them get in the trenches ASAP,” says Scanlon.
A quick way to evaluate your onboarding and orientation process is to consider how many days it takes for someone to be working independently before and after you start an orientation process. Less days means your business will be using your new employee’s skills faster.
Those are some general ways any HR professional can ensure 2015 gets off to a great start. But with the advancement of technology, analytics and social, there are many tools out there that can really help industry professionals use technology to help manage individual, team or department performance.
“I think that one thing to remember is to make as many judgments as you can based on fact and analytics,” says Bill Peppler, managing partner of Kavaliro, a national award-winning staffing firm. “The tools that are available from a metrics standpoint for HR are unbelievable and continue to improve.”
In the staffing industry, tools via social media are helpful in recruiting, says Peppler. Kavaliro uses fyre, a new cloud-based recruiting software, which streamlines the candidate tracking process to help capture 95 percent more leads.
Fyre brings recruiters the opportunity to harness big data in the recruitment process and capitalize on leads like never before. Fyre works with existing applicant tracking system (ATS) and other sites used to source faster, make warmer calls and place more jobs.
With Fyre, there’s no need to change the workflow or learn a new system. As you view candidates, Fyre slides into view, displaying useful details, notes and different contact methods, including social media profiles. Streamline communication with your staff by effortlessly seeing which candidates are already being worked with. There is no need for cross-referencing between systems because everything is kept up-to-date automatically. Fyre saves every resume for later access and creates a database for your team, enabling you to save money and work smarter.
“With the staffing growing into a more than $422 billion industry worldwide, it’s vital that the technology we use evolves to keep up,” said Tim Arnold, CEO of Fyre.
“Everyone knows time is money, yet opportunities are being lost with 80 percent of calls not seeing follow up and only 5 percent of candidates make it into a company’s database. Not to mention awkward situations of when candidates are called that were already placed or have spoken to someone else at your agency. That’s a major waste of time and Fyre can eliminate that.”
The average recruiter views more than 100 candidates a day. With Fyre, they can save as much as 90 seconds per candidate, giving them around 2.5 more hours a day to fill more jobs. On top of saving time, Fyre gives the recruiter instant access to more information, meaning cold calls are set up for success.
Another way to judge your hiring efforts is by analyzing the benefits of permanent full-time hires versus temporary/short-term help for project-based work, or during peak busy times.
“Temps can be a tremendous help to your company and possibly the solution,” says Peppler. “By hiring high level IT and other professionals, your company can produce a high level of technical work.”
Peppler says Kavaliro has clients that work projects a month, six months, or 5 or six years, contingent, with no liability for the company. While employment in almost all of the United States is “at-will” meaning that companies can terminate employees for any reason or no reason (except for things specifically prohibited by law, such as race), in reality, most companies don’t follow that pattern, says Peppler.
“They have strict protocols for terminations,” he says. “This is a great thing, but it can be expensive. Hiring temps allows you to circumvent that process.”
Take advantage of technology whenever possible, says Peppler.
“Ultimately I think companies can look back at analytics and scorecard and understand if they had a successful year,” he says.
At Kavaliro, they use a calculation based on return to payroll to see if they are meeting or exceeding hiring needs, says Peppler. This snapshot is reviewed quarterly with the leadership team to make sure the company is meeting the needs of internal and external clients.
“In addition to looking at statistics or analytics make sure to understand opportunities that may be around the corner,” says Peppler. “Is there a proposal or successful RFP that may come due that could add headcount? Are there any government incentives to expand that you need to make note of?”
Think outside the box and look to analytics. Using this combination of practical and technical processes outlined by Scanlon and Peppler can help you analyze 2014 while helping you succeed in 2015.
