Recruiting (5)
Recruiting
Hiring Process Steps Explained
The hiring process is comprised of many steps for bringing a new employee into your company. Employers identify a need, recruits from a pool of talent and eventually hires the candidate to fill the role based perviously determined qualifications. Most companies follow the same process but all have certain variables added to thehirinqg mix that vary widely based on culture and types of jobs. Below are the most common steps in today’s hiring process. Hiring Process, Step by Step Identify Your Need Hiring starts with identifying a role that needs to be added. Usually a hiring manager will tell his HR team that he needs to add staff to fill a need in their department. It could be a newly created job or one that has to be backfilled after a person leaves. Job Description A job description should be generated that is unbiased and speaks to the candidate. It should contain job requirements, how you qualify, salary/benefits and even reason(s) for why a prospective candidate should apply. Start Recruiting Recruitment starts with announcing the new opportunity both internally and externally. But before you begin that figure out where you are going to publicize the role, how you will screen potential candidates, what the interview process will be like and who will conduct the interviews. Advertise the Job Begin by posting the job to your applicant tracking system.Promoting the new job opening should start by informing your existing employees. They may be able to refer a friend or colleague to the position thus helping you generate candidates quickly. At most companies referrals are a major way (40% or more) people get recruited. Next, advertise the job on national and/or niche job boards to attract active job seekers. Post the job link to your companies social media channels as well to help spread the word. Job promotion will be important especially in tight job markets where good candidates are at a premium. Source Candidates If you have an internal recruiting team, sourcing candidates proactively should also begin. This type of practice recruitment ensures you are targeting good quality candidates who are already employed but might be the perfect fit for your role. Leverage sites like LinkedIn social media and external resume databases to find this talent. Review Applicants Companies receive applications mainly two ways, by email or through an applicant tracking system. At this point its up to your recruiters to review each resume and reject or move to the next stage. Some ATS platforms also will rank or score resumes according to criteria you set which is helpful when having to review a high number of applications. Screening Process Most interviews usually will begin with a phone screen (with recruiter or HR) although nowadays a video cover letter might be included in the process. These phone screens last around 20-30 mins and are used to determine if the candidate meets the minimum qualifications and is actually interested in the role. These quick interviews are used to narrow down the list of candidates for the next stage. Formal Interviews Each company has a different interview cadence but generally interviews are comprised of the following; One on ones with the hiring manager that usually focus on the candidates experience, skills, work history and fit for the role Follow ups for group interviews (or within a team) that take place in person or in a virtual interview setting. Technical interviews for candidates who may need to take coding tests or whiteboard complex problems. Final round with leadership so they can sign off on the new hire or go more in-depth on a particular topic to validate their expertise. Assessment tests may also be given after interviews to help gauge a candidates proficiency with certain software or other complex skill. The key to interviewing in today’s environment is to keep the total number of interviews to a minimum to ensure a smooth candidate experience. The Background Check For many roles expecicially ones that work with money or sensitive data, a background will need to be done to check if a candidate has any kind of major red flag in his/her background. Some employers may go a step farther and review any public accounts found on sites like Facebook and twitter. They are looking to ensure this person would represent the company in a professional manner. Dry screens may also be required at this step. Decision Time After whilltling down your final list of candidates to 3 to 5 people and vetting them, it’s time to make your decision on who to hire. Your team should also have a backup candidate identified in case your first choice turns down the job. Acceptance rates are usually high at this stage but it pays to be prepared for the unexpected. Check References Reference checks help verify any pertinent information shared by the candidate about previous employment. Questions like ‘would you rehire this person’ or ‘what do they need to work on’ are great for generating valuable feedback on your candidate. Make the Offer Once you’ve decided on a candidate it’s time to give them the good news and prep your offer letter. The letter must include the following information; Job title Start date Starting salary Location (or remote) Benefits and vacation time. Any other terms and conditions of the role. Your candidate may wish to negotiate the salary so be prepared to adjust the offer letter based upon those conversations. Onboarding After your candidate accepts its a matter of process of filling out paperwork related to their employment. You’ll need documents like: Form W4 I-9 form and E-Verify Tax Withholding and Registrations Copy of drivers license Employee handbook NDA Once the paperwork is finalized your onboarding can begin in earnest. Some employers do a better job at onboarding than others. You’ll need to make your new hire feel welcome by properly introducing them to your team, setting them with a computer, training if applicable, passwords and whatever else they need to be successful. You may even want to assign them a buddy or mentor to help guide them in their first 33/60/90 days of employment.
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Recruiting
How to Define Recruiting
Recruiting involves the art of attracting, screening, engaging, and hiring candidates from the available pool of workers. At a high level, it involves identifying the skills, traits (culture fit) and qualifications of your ideal candidate. To expand on that definition you can add the development of your employer brand and the evolution of the candidate experience to ensure a smooth process for both applicants and recruiter. Recruiting Definition Recruitment stages include: job requisition, job posting, sourcing proactively, assessing talent and engaging them. Recruiters must be trying to convert the candidate at each stage, eventually leading then to apply and accept the job offer. In Job analysis you identify the need and specify it on paper via a written job description. in Souring you scour the web for candidates and contact them proactively to “pitch” them your opportunity. In the assessment stage you screen them to ensure good fit and then convert them into an applicant. To complete the act of recruiting an offer is made, an agreement is reached on a salary and onboarding begins. Generally speaking recruiting is conducted by talent acquisition professionals (recruiters and sources) but if you are a smaller organization can also be handled by business owners and office managers. Alternatively some companies choose to outsource recruiting to 3rd party staffing firms who act on the company’s behalf and take a cut of the salary if a hire is placed. That’s Recruiting! A simpler definition of recruiting might be something like this: Convincing talent to come to work for you. Got your own definition of recruiting? Tell us.
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Recruiting
What are the 3 Types of Recruitment?
From job board postings to employee referrals, texting to talent pools, twitter announcements, LinkedIn messaging and scouring lists of conference attendees, these are just a sample of how recruiters try to attract candidates. As varied and creative as these tactics are, for our purposes we’ll sort them into three broad, yet basic types of recruiting: Inbound Outbound Internal These may appear to be distinct methods of recruiting workers, and they can be. More often employers use all three, announcing openings on company intranets to encourage internal applicants and employee referrals while simultaneously posting to job boards and reaching out to previous candidates and others sourced from business and social networks. Let’s take a deeper look into each of these categories. Inbound recruiting In its simplest and most basic form, recruiters post openings to job boards and then review, rank and select candidates from the resumes and applications they receive. Referred to as “post and pray,” this type of reactive recruiting – reactive because recruiters react to the incoming applications – now is part of a broader and sophisticated recruitment marketing program. Inbound recruitment today is a year-round strategy that begins with building a strong employer brand. It’s a program of continuous attraction and awareness that encourages the best talent to want to come to work for you. As they apply – even without a specific opening – they become part of a pool of talented people already interested in working for you. Then as jobs come open, recruiters tap the pool inviting candidates with the right combination of skills and background to take the next step. A solid inbound recruitment strategy includes showing what it’s like to work for the company, demonstrating the organization’s sense of social responsibility and providing an objective perspective on employer review sites. Posting jobs, participating in job fairs and college recruiting and similar recruitment tactics are all part of a comprehensive inbound effort. Outbound recruiting This type of recruiting is sometimes called sourcing, even if sourcing specialists insist the term should only be applied to them. It involves searching for people with special skills and unique backgrounds for jobs that are particularly hard to fill simply by posting a job ad. When the inbound effort fails to produce the right kind of talent, or the job is especially unique or senior, a recruiter will go hunting. They are looking for passive candidates, the people who aren’t job searching and might not even be considering a job change. More than a few studies tell us that 75% to 85% of professionals fall into the passive category. These are the candidates most coveted by employers for reasons both understandable – no one else is competing for them, and if they are working for a competitor, all the better – and less realistic – they must be good otherwise they’d be looking. Finding these passive candidates may be as simple as searching LinkedIn and texting them a compelling message. (Texting gets a much better and quicker response than email or voicemail.) Or, as is true in more cases, sourcing for especially challenging positions – the most difficult are called a “purple squirrel” hunt – may take weeks and involve scouring conference attendance and speaker lists, academic paper authorships, association directories and dozens and dozens of contacts. Once potential candidates are identified, the second step is to convince them to become applicants. That involves skills closer to sales than to recruiting. Though the statistics on converting a sourced candidate to an actual applicant run as high as only 1 in 30, the ratio of hire to sourced applicant at 1 in 43 is much better than for inbound candidates. Internal Recruiting Of all sources of hire, internal recruiting has historically been the weakest. That’s changing as employers recognize the value of promoting workers already familiar with the company culture and procedures and who have a verifiable work record. Many years ago, the tech company Cisco surveyed its entire workforce to inventory the skills and talents of each employee. Not only did Cisco want to know about the talents they use on the job, but what other skills and abilities did they have. The company then used this information to recruit first from its existing workforce. More commonly, recruiters will simply post job opening notices internally. A majority of companies, including many SMBs, have referral programs that pay a bonus to employees for recommending people who are later hired. Other companies leverage their alumni networks for this same purpose. The biggest challenge to internal recruiting is the reluctance of managers to part with their best talent and their eagerness to suggest the less able. To get around that problem, smart employers provide incentives to managers for mentoring and nominating employees for promotion. A combination of all three As we said earlier, at all but the smallest companies, recruiters employ all three methods in their efforts to find and hire talent. Building a positive employer brand and showcasing it on the company website and social media not only helps attract quality active jobseekers, but helps convince the passive workers your source to join the company. And no recruiter should overlook the top talent that may be working right down the hall.
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Recruiting
What are Sourcing Techniques
The most critical part of any recruitment program is searching for the talent a company needs to fill a current opening or for jobs expected to become available in the future. There are multiple methods of finding candidates. Sourcing active job seekers by posting a job and selecting from among the applications that come in is the most common. Passive sourcing is the art of proactively searching and identifying talent that isn’t looking for a job and may never have even heard of the company. Sourcing these passive candidates is a more challenging and time-consuming process, especially if the job has unique requirements or is in high demand. But it also can yield candidates who are more productive and more likely to make a strong, positive impact. Sourcing is Proactive The first place to start a proactive search is in your own backyard. For every job opening a company will receive dozens or even hundreds of applications. But only one candidate gets hired. The runners-up were likely just as good. Many have since gained more experience and learned new skills. Now, instead of the silver or bronze medal, these once and future candidates could become your gold medalists. Social media, too, is a powerful way of identifying potential candidates and developing leads. Every day, hundreds of recruiters sift through the 740 million profiles on LinkedIn for the people who best fit their open jobs. Not only do these profiles have such basic information as work experience, skills and accomplishments, many include links to portfolios, projects and professional articles. Communicating with these potential candidates may be the hardest part of sourcing on LinkedIn. Professionals in high demand areas like software development may not even read your message. So instead, text them. Research puts the open rates for text messaging at 90% and the response rate is 2x as high as for phone or email. Go Beyond LinkedIn Though LinkedIn is the most popular way of sourcing passive candidates, don’t overlook other social media. Facebook is especially useful for searching for candidates among the thousands of active affinity groups on the site. While LinkedIn has its share of groups, many of those where the most in-demand professionals gather are closed. Facebook’s groups tend to be more generous. Besides joining a group, recruiters can use Facebook’s top of the page search tool to find members fitting basic search terms. With the help of web scrapers and free profile building tools, a skilled recruiter can source candidates they may not find anywhere else. Other social media can be even more fruitful, since there’s not as much competition from other recruiters. Using hashtags, Twitter and Instagram will turn up individuals as well as groups of relevant professionals. What makes them more valuable is using them to turn up leads to potential candidates. While both can be searched for specific skills or titles, searching by hashtags can be far more useful. People attending conferences, publishing articles and other work related events will tweet about them. Instagram, which is all about photos, can be especially useful. You’ll find people identified in the captions of photos from company and industry events who might not turn up elsewhere. Not sure what hashtag to use? Check the directory. Additional Sourcing Techniques Other valuable sources are association directories and professional lists and collections of academic and scientific papers, journals and books. Access to professional directories may be limited to members. Those that are open usually provide much more than a name and affiliation, so cross-check against Google Scholar and JSTOR. Professional publications will have contact information at least for the lead author, as well as the affiliation of every named contributor. Another good place to look for scientific talent is the Patent Office database. One clever and little known way of limiting searches of all kinds is to use Google and emojis. Yes, we are talking about those smiley faces and other icons people use to enhance email and text messages. By including a telephone, cell phone, email and related emojis in a Google search with your other criteria you’ll get only those results that also have contact information. Check here for a cheat sheet of emojis you can use. Our list here is just a sample of the many ways to source passive talent. We once heard of a tech search firm in Silicon Valley that distributed free paper placemats to restaurants and bars with a coding puzzle leading to their job site. You may not ever go to such lengths, but it shows that sourcing great talent can be done in all sorts of ways.
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Recruiting
How Video Interview Platforms Work
It’s hard to believe that only 10 years ago an innovative and economical alternative to flying a candidate in for an in-person interview was sending a webcam to them or have them go to an office with live video capabilities to conduct a virtual interview. Today, after a year of companies implementing effective ways to keep teams connected globally while working remotely through team collaboration tools and web conferencing software, using video interviewing has become the norm for most interviews and there’s no indication that we’ll go back to the way things were before Covid-19. Synchronous and Asynchronous Formats Currently there are two technologies within the platform ecosystem: synchronous, which is used for live interviews, and asynchronous, which is used for prerecorded interviewing. Early on, employers scheduled Skype interviews – which is a synchronous platform. Now employers are primarily using Zoom and Microsoft Teams to conduct virtual interviews. It’s convenient and economical for the candidate and the employer, plus candidates are typically very familiar with these applications. It is the new norm. Asynchronous is essentially a prerecorded interviewer. The popularity of asynchronous video interviews is increasing and the benefits are numerous. Setting up a pre-recorded interview is a simple process. First, the recruiter enters questions into the software and then invites job candidates to answer the questions. Candidates view an introductory video that describes the employer and informs them about the position. Then they are asked to respond to interview questions, using the software to record their responses using a webcam-equipped device or smartphone. The candidate can record their answers at a time that is convenient for them and the recruiter can also review the video when they are able. Besides the convenience and ease of the process there are many additional features available using an asynchronous, video interview platforms including: Intuitive and easy to get started video interview software Candidate assessment tools Video interview platforms with a full recruiting suite Video interview platforms combined with your CRM Candidate support and communication tools that keep the candidate informed of their status You can learn more about these features by checking some solutions by Select Software Reviews which recently reviewed the top 11 Video Interviewing Platforms. Cost/benefit Analysis The technology and innovation supporting the wide assortment of recruitment tools is constantly changing and improving. It’s challenging to know which tools make the most sense for your organization and what is the best long-term investment. A good way to start is doing a cost/benefit analysis. Know the full costs as well as identify the savings and gains based on the benefits when considering video interviewing including: Video interviews are 6x faster than phone interviews. You can conduct five video interviews in the same amount of time as one phone interview which is typically 30 minutes long. Making it more effective than phone screens. 84% of the candidates schedule a video interview within 24 hours of receiving a text invite; thereby reducing the cost and inefficiency of scheduling in person interviews. Video Interviews can be conducted at any time that is convenient for the candidate! Plus, candidates also can rerecord their video responses, leading to candidates having a better sense of being able to answer the question. The hiring team can better evaluate candidates because they can re-watch the video whenever they want, allowing them to go beyond a quick look of a resume in order to learn more about more applicants, helping to make better hiring decisions. Less time spent screening applicants, especially with the use of AI and various candidate assessment tools. Standardizing of the interview process with increased consistency in questioning and interview techniques. Less biased hiring. Decreased time-to-hire. Better candidate experience and excellent opportunity to positively reinforce your employer brand. Automated communication throughout the interview process. Two critical actions and some additional cost to keep in mind to ensure a successful process is to: Provide ample communication to your candidates on the video interviewing process and set expectations for their experience as well as how this content will be used. Make sure there is readily available technical support, should your candidate run into issues or need additional instructions. Just sending a link to your candidate for the video interview will not be a successful approach. By integrating video interviewing strategies into your talent acquisition processes, you can achieve cost savings and major long-term benefits resulting in better hiring decisions. ### Margaret Boros contributed to this article.
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Recruiting
Building a Proactive Talent Pipeline
Awhile back many organizations made a switch from using the term “recruitment” to “talent acquisition”. Talent Acquisition is not only a catchy phrase and continues to gain popularity, but it signifies a different approach because it is an ongoing strategy to find specialists, leaders, or future executives for your company. Building a talent pipeline requires time and effort. Recruitment tends to focus on filling vacancies, being transactional and concentrating on immediate actions and short-term goals. Think of the hours spent reviewing applications received through an open requisition and only using that limited pool of candidates to make a critical hiring decision, versus selecting someone who truly is a great fit. Having the title of recruiter does not mean you aren’t strategic and don’t have a long-term strategy to find talent. However, so many recruiters are burdened with high workloads, administrative tasks and time draining activities that they don’t have enough time in the day to do higher level work. The best recruiters focus on building strong, proactive talent pipelines. It takes time and an understanding of the long-term staffing needs of the organization, but once in place, your organization can reap the rewards of having a proactive recruiting pipeline. It’s what the best executive search firms do, so why not do it within your organization? What is a talent pipeline? Creating a talent pipeline is the process of identifying and engaging with candidates long before a position comes open – they’re not actually “candidates”. Rather, they’re people you are building a relationship with who have the essential skill set required in frequently hired and key positions within your organization. So, when a position is available in a few months or even years, you have a proactive talent pipeline of people who can fill the role quickly and, more importantly, will excel in the role and want to join your company. A recruiting pipeline: Significantly reduces the time to hire. Hard to fill roles typically taking over 3 months to fill can be filled as soon as the position officially becomes open. This can be extremely important in sensitive roles where a project can’t go forward without the people with the necessary skills to do the work. Reduces the aggravations of a standard hiring process such as scheduling interviews with different stakeholders and spending needless time on unqualified candidates, when no one has any extra time. Increases the likelihood of the retention and long-term success of the new hire. During the time you have been building the relationship with someone in the pipeline, that person is also learning about the organization and seeing how they’ll fit in for the long term. So once the position is open, there’s less convincing about why to join, and more of a celebration about becoming part of the team. Talent pipelines require relationship building: Relationships are ingrained in who we are as people. Relationships matter and help people in making decisions. So, if you have taken the time to build trusting relationships with people who have the skills your organization needs, when someone who has a choice to work for multiple companies, they will more than likely choose your organization versus going through a standard transactional recruitment process where the candidate applies, goes through the interview steps and maybe becomes an employee. Plus, the candidate can trust they are making a great decision given you’ve been talking to them professionally for years. Talent pipelines are built over many years. In order to meet people, you need to attend networking events, industry trade shows, ask for introductions, personalize your content to job boards and resume databases, be responsive and accessible. Talent acquisition is a relationship business not a transaction or a metric What’s keeping you from building a talent pipeline? Screening unqualified resumes (typically only 10% of resumes received meet job requisition qualifications). Sourcing candidates for an immediate fill due to lack of applicants to your job posting. Interview logistics. An overload of open requisitions. Not enough time since the task work interferes with the strategic work. How to solve the dilemma? It’s now easier and more affordable than ever, to automate the things that are repetitive, time drains and overwhelming. That’s the beauty of AI (artificial intelligence). AI can easily and more accurately handle the top-of-funnel sourcing, screening candidates and answering common questions. It’s not about taking jobs away so much as freeing up recruiters to do more valuable work, like relationship building! With more time, go to a seminar, network, reach out to people to set up a time to talk and learn more about someone you recently met. Maybe they love their current job and boss and there are no opportunities with your company for them right now. But things can change in a few months. Businesses, organizations, work situations, people are constantly changing and evolving. With a strong talent pipeline in place, you can be ready and in better control for the constant changes in the workplace and talent needs. Use AI to get more time. Then you use the time to be more strategic. That’s how you replace “transactional” with “adding value”.
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Recruiting
Understanding SaaS Recruitment Software
SaaS recruitment software refers to on-demand ‘software as a service’, whereby the database and features are hosted in the cloud. SaaS for recruiting has been the prevalent model of recruitment software delivery for over five years. If you are still using a self-hosted or even an on-premise recruitment software delivery model, you can do so much more for less by using a SaaS recruiting software model. Why move to a SaaS recruitment software model Cost Effective: SaaS recruiting software does not need IT infrastructure support, internal maintenance, or additional staffing. The SaaS recruitment software provider takes care of the back-end requirements which are included into your subscription cost. Your subscription cost will more than likely cost less than the implementation and overhead costs of using your IT infrastructure, internal maintenance and additional staffing under an on-premise recruiting software model. A subscription also lets you buy what you need for the number of recruiters using your system versus spending for services that you never use. Easy Implementation: Most SaaS recruitment software allows you to import existing data easily, testing is minimal, there’s no software to implement and you can operate almost immediately once your subscription begins. Also, SaaS recruitment software will allow you to download data and integrate to other systems easily. Easy Access: Given this past year of working remote and using cloud technology on a daily basis, the recruitment industry has made a permanent change to primarily being a remote based function. Given the nature of SaaS you can access to your recruitment software anywhere you have an internet connection. When you are going through resumes and looking for best fit candidates, there’s no reason to be tied to a specific device or location. Tools focused on SaaS for recruiting functions set you free. Staying Current with Technology Changes: Technological improvements are happening continuously and technology upgrades are the provider’s responsibility with SaaS recruitment software, not yours. For example, SaaS recruiting systems are now mobile-friendly, and constantly evolving with new and expanded services within the Applicant Tracking, On-Boarding and Customer Relationship Management space. SaaS is the dominant trend in recruiting software More remote, freelance, and contract recruitment opportunities will become available in different industries as recruiting becomes more about networks, contacts, and relationship-building. The repetitive and mindless aspects of recruitment can now be done through AI (artificial intelligence). Screening, sourcing, and shortlisting can be done automatically through AI, freeing up your recruitment team to focus on the more value-add tasks. Candidate rediscovery becomes easier. 24/7 access to your SaaS recruitment database, lets you find past qualified candidates, contact them, and quickly move through the recruitment process to get someone hired and in place sooner than conducting a new search. Integrations with an ATS and other software will continue to get easier, promoting a positive candidate experience because the different products and services a recruiter needs will be “communicating” to each other more effectively. Technology is constantly evolving and at a quicker pace than ever before. Within HR, the Talent Acquisition function is changing at faster pace than many of the other HR functions. HR needs to stay current, adaptable and responsive to this constant evolution when it comes to productively sourcing the best talent. Using a SaaS recruiting software is essential.
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Recruiting
How To Measure Cost Per Hire
Knowing the cost per hire is one of the more essential recruiting metrics. It ranks up there with source of hire and time to hire. Like those two, the cost of talent attraction reflects on the efficiency of your recruiting efforts, especially when you compare it against benchmarks for your industry or comparable occupations. In order to provide a reliable yardstick for employers to measure and compare their cost of hire, the Society of Human Resource Management developed a formula that’s become an industry standard endorsed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). It lists all the possible types of expenses associated with hiring and goes into great detail about how to assemble it all. It can appear intimidating, especially for smaller business, but not all applies to every organization. The standard itself allows for some estimating and says, “While this Standard defines the types of expenses to include, a ‘down to the penny’ reconciliation of costs into the precise buckets… is not required.” Cost Per Hire Formula Calculating cost per hire sounds deceptively simple. Add up the cost of advertising the jobs, typically the cost of posting to a job board like ZipRecruiter or Indeed. Add in any other out-of-pocket costs like travel expenses for candidates from out of the area and there you have it. A surprising number of businesses, if they calculate cost of hire at all – one survey found 17% don’t – assume this is what it costs them to hire a worker. They’re wrong. Even small businesses spend more to fill an open position than they suspect. The out-of-pocket cost for a job board posting is only the most obvious expense. But what about the time it took to write the ad, place it, review the applications, interview the candidates and make an offer? If the business is large enough to have a recruiter, their total comp is part of the equation, plus the infrastructure – desk, chair, phone, computer, etc. – to support them. The SHRM formula for calculating cost per hire is itself straightforward: Internal costs + External costs divided by the total number of hires in a given period, most conveniently (but not necessarily) a year. In a survey a few years ago, SHRM found the average cost per hire was $4,425. Half the almost 500 respondents reported spending less than $1,633. Hiring an executive was much more costly, averaging $14,936. Another survey a year before put the average cost per hire at right around $4,000. What those surveys make clear is that hiring workers is expensive. And keep in mind these are average costs that take into account hiring everyone from an entry-level clerk to a CFO. Let’s take a look at some of the more common costs of recruiting and hiring starting with the ones likely to be easiest to track. These are what the SHRM / ANSI standard calls “external costs.” External Recruiting Costs Advertising expenses: Most commonly job board posting, but also including such sites as LinkedIn and Facebook, etc. Career fairs: The cost to participate for in-person and virtual fairs, plus the travel expenses of recruiters to attend. Agency fees: Costs paid to outside recruiting services. Screening and assessments: These include skills testing, medical screens, background checks and similar Candidate expenses: Interview travel, and travel and relocation costs paid to new hires, signing bonuses and, if necessary, immigration costs. Technology: The cost of the recruiting software. Internal Recruiting Costs Recruiter salaries: Total comp package costs. For companies without full-time recruiters, use the portion of their time attributed to recruiting. Office costs: Office expenses attributed to the recruiting function, include a pro rata share of rent and office equipment. Interviewing: Time spent by hiring manager and others interviewing and selecting candidates. Include any time spent by these to prepare. Once you know the costs, you can – and should — calculate the cost per hire by job type, department, management level and in other ways that make sense for your organization. Having this information allows you to compare costs to identify ways of improving hiring efficiency. If one hiring team routinely conducts multiple panel interviews, it might be possible to streamline the process without sacrificing hiring quality. Candidates will certainly thank you for that. There is one important ingredient missing from the cost of hire calculation and that is what can be called “lost opportunity.” An open position will have economic consequences: a project may be delayed, a sales opportunity missed, a customer who failed to get a deliver on time. No cost per hire formula takes this into account. It’s just too speculative nor is that the purpose of the measure. Still, having an open position has a cost. In large organizations with other workers who can fill-in, the cost may be barely visible. The smaller the business, the clearer the financial impact. The longer it takes to fill an open position, the more significant become those things that don’t get done or have to be delayed. So as you use your cost per hire strategically to measure recruiting efficiency and manage hiring expenses, keep that in mind. Cheaper hiring isn’t always better.
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Recruiting
Recruiting Metrics to Measure Success
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “what gets measured, gets managed.” In recent years, the need for data and analytics has reached its way into the field of recruiting often with fortune 500 companies having a whole sub-department within HR dedicated to providing people and recruiting metrics. Measuring and monitoring these numbers helps a business understand the talent market and landscape relative to their overall operations. What are recruiting metrics? Recruiting metrics are ways to measure hiring success and also to optimize your recruitment funnel. When analyzed correctly, they help talent organizations to evaluate the effectiveness of recruiters and the efforts of their outreach and recruitment marketing spend. It’s important to gauge your recruiting “ROI”. After all, hiring someone who is more suited for the job has the potential to create an enormous return on investment for the employer. Recruiting metrics are best used in looking at the short term and long term view of bringing talent into an organization. The short term view can be average time to hire and turnover. Utilizing average time to hire and turnover together can help an organization build a staffing plan. One would not think to look at turnover when considering average time to hire, but it’s important because turnover drives when an opening occurs. Time to Hire Metrics The average time to hire is important to look at not just at the organization/enterprise level but also across disciplines (IT, accounting, legal, etc.) and countries as different cultures have different professional standards. Oftentimes organizations want the fastest time to hire which is great to have, but getting there takes time. According to data from ATS vendor Yello, average time to-hire across all industries is 3-4 weeks. Of course harder to fill roles will always skew these types of numbers. To really find out where hiring is slowing down, looking at each step of the recruiting process and finding the bottle necks allows an organization to truly reduce this time. Why should an organization perform this analysis? Reducing the time to hire is all about generating a positive candidate experience and helping the organization succeed in the war on talent and delivering on its overall strategy. After all, you cannot deliver on strategy without people! Source of Hire Metrics One of the most popular metrics to track is the source of hire which identifies where your candidates are coming from. Following this metric allows you to track the effectiveness of your recruitment marketing spend by showing you incoming applications from job boards, social media, email campaigns, referrals and your career site. Today job search engine Indeed is typically at the top of the list when it comes to source of hire. LinkedIn is also a top performer. Capturing where candidates are coming from is important because it informs the organization/company where talent pools are located, and it is best viewed on an annual basis to allow time to gather the data. Gathering sources of hire is especially important for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives when it comes to recruiting. Cost Per Hire Metrics Cost per hire can include several factors: recruiter salaries, cost of job board postings, interview time, loss of production time due to turnover, etc., and it can also vary by industry. Some employers don’t include recruiter salaries in this number so it can be a matter of choice if you just want to track paid spend that converts to hires. Conversion Metrics Talent leaders often overlook their Apply conversion rates. For instance do you know how many clicks it takes from your Indeed spend to generate one completed application? By analyzing this data (clicks divided by applies) one can learn a great deal about which traffic sources perform best. By constantly evaluating these numbers you can adjust marketing spend and ensure you are getting the best ROI for your money. From the data we’ve seen, traffic from Google for Jobs is one of the best when it comes to generating applications and time spent on your site. Quality of Hire Metrics Quality of hire typically includes the overall performance rating of the new hire which is usually only captured once a year in large businesses. For small to medium size businesses, it might include new hire turnover (employees <1 year of service). Sometimes referred to as “First-year attrition”, this key recruiting metric indicates hiring success. If a candidate fails to live up to expectations within the first year of work something went wrong when evaluating them. This error costs companies money. But there are steps you can put in place to mitigate this risk. It might mean revamping your job descriptions to align better with the role you have an opening for. Oftentimes candidates can misunderstand the job description and/or employers can “oversell” the role as something it is not. Taking the longer term view on metrics allows the talent acquisition department to look into the “rear view” mirror to see how the talent delivered that the recruiters brought into the organization. Job Satisfaction Metrics Candidate job satisfaction is a way to measure whether you are meeting their expectations. So it’s important to survey them six months into their work experience. A low job satisfaction rating surly indicates that what the recruiter told them about the role has not played out. This again points to using a more realistic job preview set forth by the job description and hiring manager. Recruiting Metrics & Business Outcomes In reporting recruiting metrics, an organization’s talent acquisition and/or human resources department can drive accountability with hiring managers in regards to generating a positive candidate experience, but it also allows talent leaders and C-suite executives to measure how they are doing against their business strategy. If the strategy includes revenue growth, then having the right sales force and support in place at the right time is critical. Without knowing and/or reporting on recruiting metrics, the business is losing out on valuable data in order to scale and plan both in the short term and long term when it comes to hiring the right talent. There are certainly other recruiting metrics to be tracked such as things like offer acceptance rates, percentage of open jobs per department, recruiters sourcing times and selection ratio, but the metrics mentioned above provide the best baseline for how effective your recruiting process is. Time spent analyzing these numbers will prove to be a win-win for your recruiting team and the candidates they seek.
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Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
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