How to Optimize the Skills and Traits You Look for in Candidates
The Impacts of Rushed Hiring
In the war for talent, internal recruiting teams are under pressure to speed up their hiring processes. However, over-prioritizing speed rather than quality has led to teams having poor hiring outcomes, and here’s why.
Hiring quickly leads to bad hires, costing companies 2-3x more when the hire doesn’t work out long-term.
An even bigger problem is that most companies know they are losing on candidate quality. Not even half of their hires have worked out since COVID started - usually due to a poor role or cultural fit.
Here are a couple of tips on how to fix this.
Emphasize Soft Skills in Your Hiring Process
Businesses must start making significant changes regarding recruiting, onboarding, and retaining talent. And the time is running out before they have the opportunity to adapt or begin to suffer financially.
Hiring adequately trained and productive employees is the first thing employers need to do instead of rushing their hiring process.
Instead of focusing exclusively on "hard" technical skills, they should re-focus to include soft skills. Organizations are finding that they often don’t have enough soft-skilled workers, damaging productivity.
Teams fill jobs faster if they look for hard skills but it takes a while to get productive. If you value soft skills, you fill jobs more slowly, but they have the qualities to be more effective, even though they're harder to find.
A company focusing on soft skills and productivity (rather than rushing its hiring) is also more agile and adaptable.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, agility, and adaptability are critical to business success.
What to Look for in Soft Skills
It's good to see that internal recruiting teams are ready to make changes – in a recent study, well over half said they want to change how they recruit and recognize the consequences of not acting now.
Face-to-face interviews and psychometric tests need to be used to assess a candidate's interpersonal skills. An employer app can also help them track candidates' progress and communicate better.
Studies have also shown that lengthy, manual recruiting processes turn off candidates. For instance, Bullhorn's recent study found that 75% of younger job candidates abandoned their applications because of the manual process. No one likes to upload a resume and re-enter it!
Some businesses embrace the new soft-skilled talent cultures, boosting their productivity and agility. They know that companies with solid talent cultures will be able to rise above the talent war and steer their way through the unknown future.
Due to the recession, we’ve already seen companies begin hiring freezes and 1.5 million lay-offs (1% of the US population) of less essential roles. Employers and internal recruiting teams need to act now to improve the quality of their hiring before they go under.
Photo credit: Getty/Doucefleur