Less is more. It’s a lesson that we all have learned to appreciate early on in our personal lives, but why don’t we apply it to our recruiting practices? Most hiring managers like to think that the more resumes they look at, or the more people their resume database screens, or the more recruiters they hire the more likely they are to get the right employee. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth. If anything, when it comes to recruiting, more always means more complicated, cumbersome, and frustrating. Our advice, keep it simple.
Less Resumes, More Experts According to Glassdoor, the average job posting brings in anywhere from 75-250 resumes. Chances are you aren’t about to go through every one of those resumes, and your keyword search database is bound to let some great candidates fall through the cracks. Many 3rd party recruiters will waste your time by sending you 15+ resumes hoping to make anything stick so they can get paid. Therefore, refuse to work with anybody, whether it be HR or a recruiter, who is going to send you more than FIVE SOLID resumes. If your HR team or recruiters are truly experts in finding talent, they will find you candidates that meet or exceed your expectations, rather than just sending candidates that MIGHT be a fit. You just have to trust them to have your best interests in mind. After all, if you didn’t trust them why did you hire them? Less Choices, More Certainty You’re probably still skeptical about the last point. You’re thinking only FIVE? I am only supposed to look at five resumes before making my choice? This lady is full of [expletive]! However, have you heard of the Paradox of Choice? American Psychologist, Berry Schwartz, defines it as when you get so anxious by all the choices that it affects your ability to make the right choice. It’s like walking into a department store and getting so overwhelmed by all the options that you either walk out with nothing, or walk out with buyer’s remorse after purchasing something you didn’t really like. The same thing goes for candidates. The more resumes you look at, the less certainty you have that person you chose to hire was the right choice, therefore limiting your ability to put faith in them to do the job. Remember that these FIVE resumes should all be from candidates with the SOLID skills that fit your requirements. The only uncertainty would be whether they are a culture match which you can find out as you interview them. Less Recruiters, More Coverage The way modern day recruiting is set up makes it easy to hire five recruiters on contingency and let them do all the work for you. However, there are a few things wrong with this. First, you are making the other four recruiters work for free if you end up not hiring their candidate. Second, your recruiters know there are other recruiters on the same search meaning they are likely to send the same candidates they sent to you to other companies as well to heighten the odds of them getting a hire. Lastly, you are devaluing the position and the company. Odds are the recruiters are pulling from the same talent pool. Meaning the best candidates are going to be approached by multiple different recruiters about the same position making your company look bad and devaluing the desirability of the position. The easy fix is hire only one recruiter that you trust, AND hire them on an exclusive Cotainer or Retainer basis. You aren’t losing out on any of the coverage of having multiple recruiters because this recruiter is now even more loyal to you and willing to give you 110% since you are now both fully vested in the search because you both have skin in the game. Furthermore, you aren’t losing out on the coverage of having more recruiters because your chosen recruiter is looking in the same talent pool. The only difference is they are maintaining the exclusivity and high desirability of both your company and position. Less Time, More Engagement Keep the hiring process short to keep the candidate engaged. According to glass door the average hiring process is 23.8 days. However, if you want to keep your candidate engaged, it should only take about 2-3 weeks after you receive the candidate’s resume and complete interviews and extend an offer. Anything longer and the candidate starts to send their resume to other companies, get other opportunities, and reevaluate their decision to leave their current job. If you want to secure top level talent you have to keep them engaged and keep the waiting time short. Less Requirements, More Imagination The more requirements you are putting on your job postings the more you are discouraging top talent from applying to your position. When writing your job positions only put the skills that are absolutely essential to the position itself, and leave off anything else that isn’t mandatory for the job. The number one reason a great candidate won’t apply to a job is because there are one or two things that are listed as “requirements” that the candidate does not excel in, making them feel as if they aren’t a fit for the job even though they would excel in the position. Therefore, you are limiting yourself to only hiring a candidate that you designed in your head and not letting the candidate use his or her unique skills to grow your team. Less Comfort, More Fearlessness Don’t get comfortable with your hiring practices. Constantly look for new areas to refine how you search for talent and how you screen potential new hires. This could mean anything from letting go of the reigns a bit and asking your HR team or recruiter to limit the submissions to the top 5 SOLID resumes, to hiring a single recruiting firm on a Retainer or Cotainer basis to handle your hiring needs. Try a different interviewing method or hire someone that brings a new outlook to your team. The more comfortable you get at your job, the more complacent you become, allowing room for the next fearless leader to outshine and replace you. You have learned over and over again throughout life that less is more. It is time to begin applying that to your recruiting practices. Don’t accept the added stress of looking through hundreds of resumes or maintaining contact with multiple recruiters. Keep it simple and trust your team and chosen recruiter who have your best interests in mind. Soon you’ll come to discover what we already know at DCAProsearch, that when it comes to recruiting, less really is more.
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Finally! The open position you’ve had on your team for the last few weeks has been filled. You feel like you found the perfect candidate after countless interviews and resumes and your new employee is in their office setting up their desk. Little did you know, this employee is about to cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and endanger your teams productivity and morale and maybe cause you to lose a major client. Why? Because you hired a lemon.
According to leadershipIQ a staggering 46% of new hires are considered mis-hires within the first 18 months. These mis-hires can have far reaching effects on your business that you couldn't prepare for.
What can you do to try and fix the problem? Although firing them seems like a good option, it means you have to give them a severance package and invest more money into a new search. Unless you make some changes in the way you screen and train new hires you are bound to hire another mis-hire at some point. Instead of engaging in the go nowhere cycle of hire and fire, take these steps to rehabilitating your mis-hires and review your hiring practices to make sure you avoid hiring another lemon later on. Make them a follower Every leader needs followers and who better to be a follower than an employee who has no ability to be a leader within your company. Followers keep the leaders within your company from engaging in a power struggle by allowing each leader to have the workforce that will allow ideas to come to fruition. Let them do the busy work you were avoiding People hate sitting around doing nothing. The same goes for your mis-hires. They’d rather sit at their desk doing busy work than sit around and spin in their chair. That makes them the employee of choice to do those time consuming tasks that take up the time of your best performing employees. Train them with incentives Have you ever thought about implementing incentives to encourage your worst employees? These incentives are nowhere near the rewards you give your best employees, but they can consist of letting your employee go home thirty minutes early once they completed their tasks, or letting them sit out of the mind-numbing financial meeting as long as they complete their sales graphs without extensive help. Give them a Mentor Although you and your employees may not have hit it off with your mis-hire, another leader in the company who doesn’t know their lack of work ethic may hit it off better. A mentor can encourage the mis-hire to better themselves and inspire them to change how they engage with your team Identify their Strengths Maybe your mis-hire really isn’t a bad employee, but they are just bad at their job. Their strengths simply don’t align with what they were hired to do. Therefore, find them a job within the company that does align with their strengths. Introduce them to other people within the company and reinforce them that it is okay to leave your team to join another team. Review Your Hiring Techniques Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If you continue to use the same hiring techniques you are going to continue to hire the same bad lemons. That’s why companies are increasingly beginning to hire outside recruiters: to add another layer of screening to filter out bad candidates. Not only do recruiters allow another layer of screening, but they are able to get you passive candidates that are already high achievers. Recruiters get you invested candidates who turn into invested employees. There is a Solution Don’t lose hope if you hired a lemon. Bad employees can often be rehabilitated to become your best achievers and future leaders within the organization. However, this comes with a warning. Too many lemons will come at a cost. That is why companies invest so much in getting their hiring practices right. DCAProsearch has proven time and time again with our hires that the right employee can increase profits, productivity, and morale of the entire office. Companies have recognized that our recruiters get it right. That is why we boast a 92.8% repeat business and referral rate for the quality of our work. Stop hiring lemons and start hiring a recruiter to lower your chances of ending up with a lemon. The push toward multiculturalism has revolutionized how many companies view potential new hires. Rather than enforcing congruency in how they require their employees to think, companies are finding the value in diversity of thought and various points of view that come with multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has become the buzz word among HR departments and hiring managers as they strive toward hiring employees from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines of thought. However, multiculturalism cannot remain simply a mandate from the Human Resources that only affects the hiring process. Rather, multiculturalism has to become a transformative movement within the company that reinvents company culture.
A movement serves as a force that revolutionizes the values and decision making process of a company, leaving no process untouched. After all, diversity and inclusion is a two-step process. Diversity cannot sustain itself without inclusion. Although hiring multicultural talent is beneficial toward improving diversity of thought, if companies do not take active steps to foster a multicultural movement then diverse thinkers will feel marginalized and excluded, stifling your employee’s ability to fully participate in the culture of the company. Therefore if companies want multicultural talent, they need to take the time and resources to ensure that multiculturalism is fully implemented in every process and task that occurs within the workplace. It may sound like a huge process, but there are actually proven ways that companies have supported the movement toward true diversity and re-imagined what it means to be a multicultural workplace. 1) Develop Diversity Group Think Tanks Most large corporations consist of thousands of employees each coming from various backgrounds. With so many people, minority voices can often be muted by the thousands of other voices within the company. Diversity groups serve as a means to unite similar voices into a force to promote inclusion for marginalized employees. L’Oréal has landed itself a top 20 spot on the Thomson Reuters Diversity & Inclusion Index for their incorporation of diversity groups within the workplace. With think tanks such as disABILITY, Out@Loreal, and Women of Color L’Oréal employees are empowered to speak out for new inclusive corporate policies and develop product for under served consumer groups. This strategy has resulted in significant growth for the brand, increasing their sales in emerging and multicultural markets by nearly 10% versus 7.1% overall according to the recent financial statements made public in their 2018 annual report. 2) Encourage Diversity Mentoring Mentoring is often praised for developing new talent, but it also serves as an opportunity for both parties involved to learn from each other. Part of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s (PwC) Diversity & Inclusion strategy is to encourage their employees to participate in diversity mentoring and sponsorship. Upper-level management is often eager to mentor lower-level employees who come from different backgrounds and bring different points of view. This not only develops management from within but it encourages employees to develop open minds and find solutions that they may not have seen before. 3) Incorporate Multicultural Teams and Management Every year the group Working Mothers releases their list of “Best Companies for Multicultural Women.” Consistently on the list are companies like IBM, Deloitte, P&G, and Accenture. A Forbes report looked into what these companies all had in common and found that the CEO’s of these companies actively promoted three things: They all provide an annual update on diversity to the board of directors; they all require a dedicated diversity executive to update them on diversity metrics; and they all meet regularly with a diversity executive to review goals and performance. These companies invest in diversity at all levels of the company and integrate it into all teams. These are key actions that companies can take to achieving their goals for Diversity and Inclusion. 4) Measure Diversity Initiatives The French hospitality company Sodexo was recently recognized in France for having the greatest gender balance within their board consisting of 53% women and a female chair. Sodexo Chair, Sophie Bellon, attributes their stride toward representation on setting goals and measuring. “What gets measured gets done,” said Bellon. Many companies have adopted similar strategies, setting goals to have their company diversity match the demographics of the nation or city they reside in. While goal setting can be a good way to motivate diverse hiring practices, it is important to recognize the difference between a goal and quota. The difference being that goals recognizes the value of diversity and encourage diverse hires while a quota forces hiring practices without valuing what diverse talent brings. 5) Serve Multicultural Audiences Having a multicultural team also makes it easier to expand into multicultural consumer spaces. Multicultural advertising agencies will all be quick to tell you the secret toward targeting multicultural audiences is to hire employees who mirror your audience. A Harvard Business Review case study revealed that cosmetic giant L’Oréal actively seeks to hire multicultural talent in their product development teams to find opportunities in new markets and to serve a diverse consumer base. 6) Value Diverse Points of View The very nature of multiculturalism in the workplace is to develop diverse points of view and gain an understanding of solutions that differ from what your company was doing before. P&G Chief Brand Officer, Marc Pritchard, told an audience that “If you aren’t doing multicultural marketing you aren’t doing marketing” at the 2018 ANA conference. Therefore, valuing and empowering multicultural voices is the first step to being able unlock the benefits of a multicultural team. 7) Invest in Cultural Brokers Although multiculturalism has been recognized by most Fortune 500 companies to be beneficial to the workplace, often times, multicultural teams develop the Tower of Babel Syndrome where team members talk past one another without understanding and teamwork breaks down. That is where cultural brokers come in. Sujin Jang, assistant professor of Organizational Psychology at INSTEAD, recently published research revealing that in multicultural teams cultural brokers can be useful to navigate and translate the different points of view. She writes in her research that “[Cultural brokers are] team members who have relatively more multicultural experience than others and who act as a bridge between their monocultural teammates.” Therefore, investing in cultural brokers can help with team morale and efficiency within the office. Multiculturalism brings substantial value to any company, but it cannot remain simply a mandate from HR. Multiculturalism is a state of mind and a movement that has to be adopted by every member of the company and woven into the company culture. Therefore, if you are looking to promote multiculturalism in your workplace, be sure to create a plan that also involves inclusion initiatives. Utilize multicultural recruiting agencies to source multicultural talent and provide tips on how to implement inclusion strategies. Hiring diverse talent is great, but without promoting proven inclusion programs your talent will leave you as fast as they came in. |
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