Fast and accurate hiring is a strategic imperative! Are you struggling to fill vacancies with high-quality talent? Addressing these common obstacles will put you ahead of your talent competitors and help you fill vacancies with ease.
Many organisations are struggling to fill open positions. It takes them weeks or months to fill just one job. The skills shortage often gets the blame. Because there are more jobs than people to fill them, leaders have come to expect that hiring will be a time-consuming challenge.
Another group of organisations are having a different hiring experience. These organisations fill their open seats with relative ease and speed, even though there aren’t enough qualified people to go around. What makes these organisations different isn’t their reputation, location, work environment, or pay and benefits. It’s how they’ve chosen to address the talent shortage. They’ve overcome three common obstacles that slow down fast hiring.
THE REAL PROBLEM
While the global talent shortage is an ongoing reality, it’s not the real problem. The skills shortage is merely a challenge that can be solved by a better process.
The critical problem—the only one you can control—is having the right kind of hiring process. The right process taps into a sufficient pool of talent and efficiently moves candidates toward hire.
To fill jobs quickly with top talent, your hiring process must overcome these three obstacles.
Obstacle #1: tapping into a candidate pool that’s too small
If you asked employers why they can’t fill jobs, more than a third will tell you they’re not getting enough applicants, or they’re getting no applicants at all. Yet, only 10 per cent of these employers leverage untapped talent pools.
Faster hiring requires mass: you must build a critical mass of candidates to select from. Building mass requires tapping into overlooked pools of people.
To determine if your organisation is tapping into a candidate pool that’s too small, take these three steps.
- Review the eight talent streams
There are eight streams of talent. Each stream provides access to unique people. Compare these streams to how your organisation acquires candidates.
- Determine which streams lead to successful hires
Review your organisation’s hires over the past six to 12 months. Note which streams these hires came from and which streams didn’t produce any successful hires.
- Assess which streams are being under-used or overlooked
Every talent stream should be producing candidates, some of whom become quality hires. Those that don’t are under-used or overlooked.
Obstacle #2: employing interviewing methods that are inaccurate and slow
During typical interviews, candidates are on their best behaviour. As a result, interviews are often a poor barometer as to who will fail or succeed in a given role. Some “newer” interview methods, such as behavioural interviewing, have only made the process longer. Hundreds of books and articles have been written on how to beat behavioural interviews. These books and articles demonstrate simple methods for telling interviewers exactly what they want to hear.
Interviews cannot be a conceptual exercise. They must allow you to see proof then-and-there that a candidate can do the job and do it well.
Take time to evaluate the speed and accuracy of your interviewing methods by reviewing each step of the process, evaluating the effectiveness of techniques used by interviewers.
Answer these questions.
- Does the interviewing technique consistently uncover irrefutable proof about a candidate’s fitness for the job?
- If “no,” how can we replace or eliminate that technique to get a better result?
- If “yes,” what can we do to streamline this technique and still get the same consistent irrefutable proof?
Obstacle #3: failing to build and maintain a prospective employee pipeline
When a seat opens suddenly, the amount of activity it generates can feel overwhelming. Without an active talent pipeline, a frantic dance ensues. Managers have to handle extra work as the organisation tries to find suitable candidates. Days later, schedules have to be coordinated for phone screenings and interviews. Work piles up, good candidates take other jobs, and nerves fray.
Maintaining a pipeline of ready-to-hire prospective employees eliminates the dance. When jobs open, there’s no rush, panic, or chaos. Instead, you can hire from your overflowing pipeline.
It’s vital that your organisation assess its pipelining strategies. Starting with the most critical roles in your organisation, answer these questions:
- For each role, how many people are ready to hire right now?
- For any roles where there aren’t people ready to hire now, where is the pipelining process failing? For example, are there viable candidates who are stuck at the interview stage? Is there a lack of suitable candidates to interview? Is recruiting failing to generate candidates? Use what you learn to address those process problems.
Speed is no longer a competitive advantage. In today’s fast-paced competitive world, it’s a requirement for doing business and hiring quality employees. The importance of having talented people exactly when they’re needed makes fast and accurate hiring a strategic imperative.
Scott Wintrip is the author of High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant, named a must-read book by SHRM’s HR Magazine. Over the past 19 years, Scott has led the Wintrip Consulting Group, a global consultancy that has helped more than 22,000 organisations build talent-rich companies that have eliminated their hiring delays forever. For five consecutive years, Staffing Industry Analysts, a Crain Communications company, awarded Scott a place on the “Staffing 100,” a list of the world’s 100 most influential leaders. He’s also a member of the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame and was inducted into the Staffing 100 Hall of Fame.