3 Quick-Fire Ways to Hire Smarter Talent
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The smartest companies in the world understand they have less than 10 days to connect with the very best talent before that talent is off the market again. Yet the embarrassing truth is that clinging to traditional practices, adding steps and overcomplicating the process has the average company burning 63 days to make a hire. In the time it takes to finally hire someone, that rockstar they missed is already assimilated to a competitor’s culture and actively making an impact. Here are three best practices to snag from companies that are succeeding in shaving the hiring process down to days:
1. Think like consumers and design a 24/7 process.
Employers who hire in days not months design their process from the consumer’s perspective. Our access to multiple devices, desire to connect via social, and expectations to do so when it’s convenient, require that a mobile first hiring process is a foundation, not a phase on the implementation roadmap.
It’s refreshing (and telling) to see an established brand such as Unilever commit to reducing their 4 month hiring process to just 2 weeks. Their process includes leveraging both corporate and employee social media reach to create awareness for jobs and uses videos captured on a smartphone to facilitate introductions and screen-in candidates who are a good culture and skills fit. It’s a textbook example of why your hiring strategy should support your business strategy. With their acquisition of Seventh Generation they’re making a bold statement to attract a healthier, hipper demographic, and now their hiring strategy reflects that.
2. Collect and analyze more relevant information in a shorter amount of time.
Employers who hire in days not months, design a process that eliminates long, irrelevant applications and leverages an analytics driven approach to capturing a candidate’s true story. Studies continually prove that what we scan about a person on a resume barely scratches the surface of who they are and can’t help us predict success in a given role. In addition, a resume based process feeds our unconscious bias and prematurely robs great talent from the opportunity to tell their story all together. A recent talk by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg illustrates just how unfair unconscious bias can be. She shared a case study that used identical resumes, one with a man’s name and one with a woman’s. The study found that 79% of applicants with a man’s name vs. only 49% with woman’s name were ‘worthy of hire’. Instead of limiting themselves to a superficial resume search, smart employers are uncovering diamonds in the rough with a light-touch, video first approach that allows them to actually see and analyze the attitude, passion and skills demonstration of the real person.
3. Remove risk and uncomplicate the process.
Employers who hire in days not months, remove layers of risk and replace them with layers of data. In any hiring process risk is directly proportional to the number of humans you insert to unravel it. When it comes to hiring, we humans are a risky bunch. If suffering from unconscious bias wasn’t embarrassing enough, we decision-shame ourselves further with confirmation bias wherein interviews become a huge waste of effort as we spend the entire time proving that our first impression is indisputable truth.
The hiring process should not have more than three rounds of interviews. Period. If there’s more than that the process falls victim to group think. Last year, Lazlo Bock published Work Rules detailing how Google finally discovered the genius of limiting the process to no more than 4 structured interviews. It works. Structured interview questions, ratings and feedback engineer fairness and create structured data. Structured data supports a repeatable formula that can predict skill and cultural fit with shockingly greater accuracy than anything else. A repeatable formula means you’re landing on the right decision the first time. While ten days may seem like the blink of an eye in the world of traditional hiring, for talent in high demand, it can feel like a lifetime. World Hiring Day saw over 300 employers conduct 15,000 interviews in a single day. It’s proof that plenty of employers already embrace top talent’s expectations and are ready to build their competitive advantage through a smarter faster hiring process that thinks like a consumer, captures what’s relevant and doesn’t over complicate it.
This article was written by Mark Newman, founder and CEO of HireVue. Mark’s passion centers on the belief that people are more than just a resume or profile. Through digital, video and mobile technologies, Mark first introduced the world to On Demand Interviews™, improving the way companies build and coach their teams, and helping candidates tell their stories – anywhere, anytime. Mark earned a bachelor’s degree in International Business from Westminster College and a master’s degree in Finance from the University of Utah. @markhirevue
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