5 Signs It's Time to Rethink Your Hiring Strategy

It’s 2019 and you are looking to UP YOUR GAME. Become more efficient, improve quality of hire, increase your ROI and so much more. Employing the RIGHT recruitment strategy is critical in today’s digital-age. PERIOD.

Here are 5 signs that should tell you if your Recruitment Strategy is working for you:

A High New-Hire Attrition/Turnover

Losing a new hire is painful. Wasted recruiting efforts, loss of critical time and productivity, cost of rehiring and retraining...it's a long list. We believe that employee retention starts at the interview stage. Here are some things you can do to improve new-hire retention at the onset itself:

• Clearly communicating the right messaging about the company and role

• Going beyond matching skills and experience and evaluating a fit of personality, culture and values

• Setting right expectations about the job effort & deliverables and possible career progression

• Avoiding over-negotiation of compensation

• Ensuring a great candidate experience during the hiring cycle that leaves the candidate on a high note before joining

When using multiple recruiting vendors, quality and consistency of the messaging and instituting a process that is diligently followed is even harder. A hiring strategy that covers these important aspects is essential, especially in today’s candidate driven market.

Decline in Quality of Candidates

Low candidate closing rate and extremely long hiring cycle are strong indicators that you are suffering from poor candidate quality. There are several reasons for this but the number one reason in today’s low unemployment market is the lack of 'Passive Candidate Strategy'. Men & women always complain that the good ones are already taken, and this holds true even in hiring.

If you can reach the passive candidate and can effectively sell the opportunity, you will certainly get their attention and your hiring manager will be a lot happier with the new hire.

Also, in today’s market, only 18% of professionals are actively looking to switch jobs and you need to work hard to get to them. Here are 4 things you can immediately do to improve the quality of candidates:

• Improve your ability to sell the opportunity to suitable candidates and execute with a sales mindset.

• Good candidates receive several calls and emails and if you are not able to get their attention, then you possibly lost out on a great new employee.

• Effective employer branding through social platforms, job portals and email marketing for positioning the company really well and attracting top quality candidates

• Create a job description that clearly states the must-haves for the job, this will reduce the number of candidate applications that are not suitable

• Pick the right platform to market the job. You don’t want to market an Architect position on a platform popular for technology skills

• Testing candidate skills by giving them assignments is a nice 'try before you buy' experience and helps you shortlist quality candidates for hiring manager interviews

Candidates Ghosting You or Rejecting The Offer

You’ve been priming a candidate who you believe is a perfect fit. They’ve gone through the whole cycle of screening - interview - reference checks and aced it. You can’t wait to have them start. But, for some reason, after receiving the offer, they reject it or even worse they’ve ghosted you.

There are a lot of reasons that are under an employer’s control as to why a candidate may drop off during the recruiting cycle or reject an offer. Here are some important ones:

• Long drawn interview process - makes them lose interest & seriousness

• Poor and irregular communication during the process - no candidate wants to keep following up

• Providing a low ball offer – not on par with the industry or expectation initially communicated, lack of homework in salary research 

• Poor employee ratings on Glassdoor – Employer branding needs serious attention before its too late

• Poor overall Candidate Experience

You need to treat your candidates like you would treat your customers!

Recruiting is Stifling The Company Growth

Companies open new job positions to manage new customer projects, cover growing operations, increase sales, be more responsive in customer support and more.  When employee ramp-up does not line up with the business growth, it becomes detrimental to the business. Hence recruitment is a very important function and a well-oiled recruiting engine is a must to compete in today’s market.

Also, a company’s quality and customer experience are directly related to the quality of its people. If your recruiting team and hiring managers have done a good job, you are bound to hire a quality employee.

On the other hand, if the recruitment process is inefficient, then chances are, this can hinder and even stifle the growth of the company. 

Here are the top reasons why companies suffer in recruiting:

• In-house recruiting team is overwhelmed and unable to ramp-up leading to longer hiring cycles, cost and poor candidate experience

• Working with too many staffing companies - Shared attention and experience, zero service commitment and non-sharing of talent pipeline

• Lack of access to latest tools and awareness of process automation that should improve performance & quality

• Lack of in-house talent pipeline

Candidate Application Rate is Abysmally Low

On an average, a job opening attracts about 250 applicants. However, having less than 100 applications on an entry level job posting should tell you that things are not alright. Especially, in this day and age where the average attention span of a person has drastically gone down, you need to do a lot more to attract and engage good candidates.

Here are 5 things you can do to increase the online application rate

• Write a job description that is not only clear but makes the opportunity realistically attractive to the candidate

• Ensure that the application form on your website is not very long and is mobile friendly or you would lose applicants halfway in filling the application OR not apply at all

• Strong online job awareness footprint, reach more potential candidates and use the right platforms to market the job

• An improved employer branding and visibility on social media will motivate more candidates to explore the job opportunities

A hiring strategy that is either outdated or mis-aligned with the business and its growth is doomed to fail. From project delays, loss of revenue to damaging brand reputation, it can have a far-reaching impact on the company. If you are experiencing any of the above signs, it is time for a strategy reboot. It is time to Rethink Your Hiring!

snipebridge is an innovator in managed services for hiring exceptional talent. In our unique model, we reconstructed the four key pillars of hiring - People, Process, Tools and Pricing. Our goal is to enable our customers to accelerate the hiring cycle by 35% and provide significant improvement in quality & retention of employees.

Contact Us Today for a FREE Consultation!