Developing Recruiting & Hiring Capabilities
A primer for curious, action-oriented leaders that are hiring talent.
The exact processes, scale, and tech you need to accomplish your talent acquisition goals will depend on your growth phase, industry, and location. TA can be filled with complexity, requiring teamwork and alignment throughout your organization. The TA capabilities your organization needs in order to deliver the necessary results is generally based on the organization's phase of growth which we discuss in detail below. Often TA includes several stages, as illustrated in the graphic below, as well as key activities and concepts outlined in the tables below.
Talent Acquisition Funnel
| Recruitment Stages | ||
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| Attraction | Screening | Evaluation |
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| Hiring Stages | ||
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| Offer | Pre-boarding | Onboarding |
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| Progressive Focus Areas for each Recruitment Stage by Maturity Phase | |||
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| Maturity Stage | Attraction | Screening | Evaluation |
| Start-up |
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| Growth |
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| Exit |
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Why implement evidence-based hiring capabilities?
Boost team performance: Hiring the right people means you get the productivity you need to achieve your goals, but the effects of a great hiring decision aren't limited to individual performance. When a new, highly performing, highly motivated employee joins a team, their enthusiasm and skill can reset others' expectations by raising the bar on what good looks like. A strong hire can signal that expectations are reasonable, but high. Conversely, a poor hire can translate to delayed deadlines, increased managerial burdens, and a dampened organizational culture.
Boost morale: When your hiring decisions create teams that get the job done and fortify your corporate culture, it provides a reason for teams to trust your leadership. When you hire someone who can't perform, morale can decline as other team members pick up the slack and lose faith in their leadership's judgment.
Boost reputation and revenue: Great hires improve your organization's credibility within its talent marketplace and amongst their current and future customers. Employees who perform win business by impressing customers and meeting their needs. Poor hires, on the other hand, erode the faith that customers and suppliers had in your brand's quality and reliability. In turn, you may lose their business.
Use resources wisely: While it's challenging to pinpoint an exact price tag, it is widely estimated that the cost of replacing an employee is up to five times an employee's annual salary. This price includes the cost of recruiting, hiring, onbaording, and training a backfill as well as the loss of productivity resulting from their predecessor's underperformance.
When & how to develop capabilities and implement best practices
As companies mature, the complexity of their operations intensifies. Successful talent acquisition allows this complexity to guide the sophistication of its recruitment and hiring processes.
Start-up
As the initial team is formed to join the founders in pioneering the mission of the business, often this is done through leveraging the team's referrals of those in their professional and personal networks to attract others to join the business building journey. By seeking individuals who embody an entrepreneurial mindset and adaptability necessary for a business in formation; selecting individuals who tend to be generalists who can seamlessly take on various roles and also deeply resonate with the organization's vision. This is also the time that the founding principles of the organization's culture is solidified which also helps guide aspects of recruitment and selection decisions. These elements commence with refining the foundational approach to hiring, ensuring an interview process that identifies candidates who align with the organization's ethos. Simultaneously, the groundwork is laid for recruitment through the formulation of initial role definitions that dovetail into crafted job descriptions that outline responsibilities and expectations. Additionally, the formulation of key pillars of your employer value proposition (EVP) is clarified through the definition of the mission and values. Collectively, these factors amongst others make up the EVP, which supports the organization's capabilities to attract and retain talent.
Growth
As an organization moves beyond a referral based hiring strategy, the focus should shift from generalized candidate skill sets to specialized expertise, supported by well-defined job descriptions, distinct job levels, and structured career paths. Simultaneously, proactively building sourcing capabilities to attract top talent becomes imperative, bolstering your talent pool. To initiate the process of scaling recruitment effectively, several strategic initiatives can have a significant impact on the organization's capability level. Formulation of an employer brand, establishing a comprehensive compensation philosophy, and implementation of HR technology are critical initiatives when transitioning from a low to high volume recruitment capability. Promoting your employer brand gains importance through online evangelism by cultivating an organic channel for attracting passive candidates. This should be complemented by the formalization of hiring team enablement through the enhancement of interviewing techniques and the upskilling of hiring managers. The strategic integration of recruitment technologies (e.g., applicant tracking system) serves as a catalyst for elevated hiring productivity. A crucial aspect of the transformation journey involves data tracking, enabling the utilization of insights garnered from recruiting insights to fine-tune TA strategies, and ensuring a holistic and refined approach to scaling recruitment efforts.
Maturity
Achieving an organization-wide approach to talent acquisition is pivotal to enterprise level growth. By establishing a solid foundation, including organization-wide standardization of hiring planning, processes and procedures, you can foster predictability in your recruitment efforts. A strategic workforce plan serves as a compass for recruiting goals and staffing decisions, enabling you to align talent acquisition strategies with succession plans, thus forming a comprehensive approach to people management. It's essential to integrate internal mobility opportunities, creating growth paths for existing employees that feed into their development and talent management initiatives. Collaborating with the HR team, people leaders and hiring managers ensures the necessary support throughout the recruitment and hiring processes. Moreover, operationalizing diversity and inclusion (D&I) hiring goals within the recruiting funnel activities becomes a priority at this maturity level, bolstering a diverse workforce. And in order to fine-tune your practices, harness the power of recruiting and hiring analytics, allowing data-driven insights to optimize your allocation of resources and refine your talent market approach.
| Start-up | Growth | Maturity |
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| Capability: Fundamentals | Capability: Scale | Capability: Predictability |
| Core Attributes | ||
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How to improve my Alotten Score
Did your Alotten Score suggest you focus on your recruitment and hiring capabilities?
4 things you can implement now that will result in better hiring decisions
- The job description serves as the foundation for the supporting TA activities and subsequent processes. It’s important to carefully scope the job details to do a thorough analysis of the workforce needs itself, the core responsibilities and outcomes expected of the role holder; and to adequately define the skills, strengths and experience a candidate would need to be considered for the role in order to direct the recruiting efforts. These details also inform many other downstream decisions such as job assignment within the organization's architecture, new hire pay, work location, performance management expectation setting, among many other important aspects of the recruitment and employment lifecycle.
- Incorporate interviewer training for those that participate in hiring activities to better hiring outcomes and mitigate liability of non compliance or candidate selection blind spots.
- Standardize how to measure a candidate's interview performance to the specific job requirements itself versus comparing candidates; techniques can include interview response anchors, interview plans, candidate scorecards, amongst other best practices.
- Add a realistic job preview component to your interview process as a way to measure the skill proficiency necessary for the job as well as provide the candidate with an opportunity to get a hands-on understanding for the actual job itself; examples include role plays, coding tests, work samples, among other possibilities.
Resources
- Recruiting Daily Candidate Experience Surveys: An Untapped Source of Recruiting Data
- The Predictive Index A Large Part of Employee Turnover is Connected to Bad Hiring Decisions
- LinkedIn Why Your Company Should Adopt Structured Behavioral Interviews
