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This article was originally published in Resume-Library. Find the original publication here.
How to Improve Candidate Quality
It’s no secret that quality is often more important than quantity. And this is no different when it comes to hiring. After all, higher quality candidates are more likely to be top performers, stay in the business for the long run and make a real difference to bottom line.
Businesses are under more pressure right now than ever before. Plus, making poor hiring decisions can be costly. If you want to be competitive, you’ll need the right people behind you.
Measuring New Hire Quality
You might already measure the quality of your new hires, and if so, that’s great. This is because if you want to understand how successful your current hiring practices are, you’ll need to assess a number of factors; quality being one of them. But, what indicates quality?
It might be:
- Performance in the role
- How long they stay in the company for
- How long it takes them to settle into their role
- The value they bring to the team/company
Every organization is different; plus, what’s important for one role might not necessarily matter in another. In any case, you should consider these factors throughout an employee’s time within the company and also look at your existing hiring practices to see what works and what doesn’t.
Below we’ll offer some insights on how to improve your quality of hire.
Work Closely With Hiring Managers
A huge part of this is ensuring that you’re hiring people who are the right cultural fit for the company and team you’re recruiting for. For that reason, whether you work in a staffing agency or in-house, you need to work closely with hiring managers to really understand what they’re looking for. This involves defining the role and what the ideal candidate looks like. What personality type is going to mesh well? What skills will make a real difference in this position?
You need to be on the same page and work collaboratively if you want to improve your quality of hire; so make sure you’re building positive relationships with hiring mangers.
Be as Transparent as Possible
Often, good hires don’t work out because companies haven’t been transparent about what the role involves and what the organization is like to work for. So, you need to ensure your job adverts are as clear as possible.
Remember, the job advert is the first impression a candidate will have of the business. Therefore, it needs to be engaging and informative. Introduce the company and role you’re hiring for, then use bullet points to break up the text and explain the key responsibilities.
You should also include a list of desirable and non-desirable skills. That way, applicants can easily see whether they’ve got the right attributes for the job. You’re always going to get people applying that might not fit the bill; but at least you’ll have done your due diligence.
Use Data to Your Advantage
Data-driven recruitment is extremely important right now; enabling hiring professionals to make the right decisions, based on facts. So, if you want to improve your quality of hire, it’s important to collect as much data as possible when assessing candidates. Alongside this, you’ll want to gather data once the hire has been made. These might be insights for annual performance reviews, or anything else that indicates how successful someone is in their role.
You can then use this information to understand what makes a great hire and what you should be looking out for the in the future.
Invest in the Right Tools
Another huge part of hiring top quality candidates is ensuring you’re investing in the right sourcing tools. You might use an applicant tracking system like Ceipal to hire, a job board like Resume-Library; or even a combination of the two.
Ceipal helps to improve the quality of hires by automatically raking and matching candidates against a job by taking their skills and other factors into consideration. Alongside this, consistency in profile submissions/placements can be maintained through Ceipal‘s powerful AI algorithms.
Resume-Library, one of Ceipal’s integration partners, uses innovative SmartMatch technology to ensure you’re matched with the right candidates. Alongside this, they’re investing heavily in machine learning, which is helping to improve job matches for candidates and ultimately, drive more applications to our clients’ jobs.
Making Objective Decisions
Unfortunately, unconscious bias is still an issue when it comes to hiring. We’re all guilty of making decisions based on pre-conceptions and this can impact your quality of hire. That’s why it’s important to focus on making objective decisions. Use that data we mentioned earlier and also bring in other individuals to help. Hiring should be a team effort, so get other team members involved in the assessment and interview process.
Improve Your Hiring Quality
Overall, these are just some of the ways you can improve your quality of hire. Remember, if you want to source the best candidates, you need to invest in the right tools. Alongside this, think about the candidate journey and how well you’re assessing applicants. Are you focusing on cultural fit, as well as their suitability for the role?
All of these are important points to consider when following this metric. Good luck!
