Act To Clear Your Recruiting Swamp
“If you really want to do something, you will find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”
Jim Rohn, Entrepreneur
Acting to Reduce Time to Hire
You’ve completed your recruiting diagnosis & found shortcomings in time to hire. The obstacles you’ve found may not look pretty. However, you can now give your recruiting team real targets for improving processes. As you accelerate your recruitment process, other areas for improvement will surface. All in its due time. Start tackling the biggest ones with the greatest return first.
Set Measurable Targets
Your engineering group has target deliverables; so too should your recruiting team. Without clearly defined deliverables, time to hire cannot be managed and deliverable quality will be compromised
Hiring managers know their time is precious. They should expect any candidate submissions by their internal or external recruiter meet the minimum articulated candidate profile requirements. That being the case, the target percent of screened candidates interviewed should be set at 100%. Is this what you currently experience?
A screened candidate is presented to the hiring manager. Does the manager arrange to speak with the candidate within 48 hours of presentation? For candidates in hot markets, delaying a phone interview by any more time can result in that candidate being approached and hired by a more nimble employer. Set, monitor & report time from presentation to phone interview.
Share Costs of a Delayed Hire
The costs of a delayed hire of a critical leader or technical contributor can be staggering. Critical hires can easily cost your firm in excess of 10X their total compensation. If you occupy the C-suite, we’d be happy to help you calibrate your firm’s cost.
Without delayed hire costs being clearly understood & estimated, Accounting & Finance might think a delayed hire is saving the firm money vis a vi lower payroll and employee medical costs. HR’s internal recruiters with multiple hiring assignments may also not understand where their priorities are to be directed. Technical team members could also miss candidate interviews, thinking their work was more important, effectively delaying thorough candidate assessments. Each delay increases the time to hire.
The net consequences of failing to collectively share and internalize how a delayed critical hire can seriously impact a firm can result in real and painful consequences; don’t let them happen.
Design Processes With Milestones
Milestones help the recruiting process move along to meet a target schedule. Just a few milestone examples can include:
1. joint management buy-in to initial hiring plan and backup plan, complete with staff resources and funding requirements:
2. identification of candidate target profile;
3. construction of a viable candidate search plan, with recruiter assigned
4. submission of first two screened & vetted candidates to hiring manager;
5. interviewer notes released no later than 24 hours from time of interview
6. offer prepared within 24 hours of candidate selected
7. hire starts, with successful 90 days on-board objectives attained
These milestones need to be clearly defined and understood by the entire recruiting team, so that its completion is unambiguous. Engineering typically celebrates their milestone successes; so should you!
Assign Responsibility for Delivering Results
Who will take responsibility for ensuring the recruiting process from search to hire will take place to schedule? This requires collaboration between your executive team, hiring manager, human resources and finance at a minimum. Think of all the stumbling blocks that impair a timely, accelerated hire that were discovered in the hiring process diagnosis, by your recruitment audit team. Without responsibilities being assigned to people across all functional groups, recruiting trip hazards will continue to exist.
Our recommendation is also for firms like yours (with your HR department taking the lead) provide lavish rewards & praise for all employees involved, who positively contributed to a successful hire. Rewards can consist of thank you luncheons or dinners, on to bonuses & special recognition before a wider company audience. The cost of these rewards pales beside the benefits derived from an excellent hire acquisition.