Why is recruitment so hard?
It feels like recruitment should be simple: you find a person, offer them a job, come to an agreement and voila! And sure, if you're happy to just throw whoever into a role, then that works fine.
But finding a great person who’s going to really help your company succeed - that’s hard. There’s a lot that can go wrong (and often does).
If you make a poor choice in the recruitment process and select someone who doesn't perform well, it's costly. A poor fit can cost between 30% and 150% of a person’s salary. This is not just due to the candidate’s individual performance (or lack thereof), but also their influence on the people around them. Hiring someone who is a bad fit is at best a loss of productivity in that role, and at worst can disrupt the entire team, or seriously damage your culture.
So how to avoid making an expensive and stressful blunder?
To hire a really great fit for a role, you need to answer three questions about each candidate:
What skills does this person have?
What are their interests and what are they motivated to do?
What kind of environment will this person thrive in?
And three things about the role:
What skills are needed to perform well in the role?
What kinds of tasks need to be done, and how often?
What daily environment and broader culture does the role exist within?
Then, you need to match these up to see if the candidate fits both the role and the company. It sounds relatively simple, but it's not easy to do well.
What do most recruitment processes do wrong?
Most recruitment processes go through the motions without having a clear understanding of what to look for in a candidate, why they are looking for it, or how to measure it.
Traditional recruitment assumes that candidates are there to sell themselves to employers, and it’s the job of an employer to make a choice. However, in today’s market great candidates have a high degree of choice about where they work. Any modern process needs to provide candidates with the right information to allow them to make an informed decision, too.
Without a clear goal in mind throughout the recruitment process, most people end up looking for someone they like and feel comfortable with. That’s great if you’re looking for a mate to have a beer with, but it’s not enough to know if they will succeed in the role.
In addition to having no clear goal, most companies also use flawed methods to sort and filter candidates. A standard recruitment process usually involves:
Reviewing candidate resumes & cover letters
Interviews with a few people from the company
A reference check with a previous employer
Collectively, this common process has been demonstrated to have a success rate of about 50%. This means that every time you hire someone, there is about a 50% chance that you have made the wrong choice and this person will not be successful in the role. This low success rate is due to a few things:
Job descriptions don’t accurately or comprehensively describe the job, or give an indication of the company’s culture or the kind of personality that might thrive there. Bad or boring job descriptions increase the likelihood of the wrong people applying (and the right ones not applying).
Reviewing resumes is riddled with bias, especially gender and racial bias. This is bad for candidates, and bad for the company.
Hiring managers tend to look for people who have done the same job before, or have X number of years' experience, but these are not good predictors of future success.
Interviews are not good at predicting job performance, because they are typically conducted with little structure, by untrained interviewers. This makes them amongst the least effective hiring methods. Using a highly structured interview conducted by skilled interviewers can predict future job performance only about 30-40% of the time.
Reference checks are flawed, because they generally assume that strong performance in one role will predict strong performance in another, but success in a previous role or environment doesn’t predict success in a new role or environment.
Our recruitment process addresses these problems, giving you a much higher chance of hiring the best person for the job.