Josh TolanIt’s easy to fall into the ‘same old’ recruiting and hiring strategies. It’s comfortable. It’s working — mostly. There’s no real urgency for making big changes. Right?
Not quite. With the WFH (work from home) era we’re in, now is the best time to improve your hiring strategies. You have the time and tools to determine how to achieve better hiring outcomes. You just need to know where to start.
As part of a recruiting and HR team, you need to constantly evaluate your efforts in order to fully optimize the process from recruiting through onboarding.
Use this template to review your recruiting efforts with your team on a quarterly basis. Discover what metrics you should be measuring and how to maximize your WFH hiring strategies.
Employer Brand
Your employer brand is the first element candidates encounter in your hiring process, so it’s critical you get it right. Everything from your job postings to your social media to your email outreach to your website needs to embody the best aspects of your company culture. Your ability to attract top talent depends on quality recruitment marketing and branding.
Keep track of these metrics quarter over quarter, and year over year, to measure your progress:
- Ratio of job posting views to job application clicks
- Ratio of website views to applications submissions
- Dropoff rate on career website
- Reach and clicks on social media
If you don’t improvements in your analytics, ask yourself these questions each quarter to evaluate your employer brand:
Does your employer brand reflect your current culture? If not, what changes do you need to implement to get it there?
Candidates will turn to your website and social media to understand what it’s like to work at your company. It’s important to measure your success on these platforms. Be sure that your content converts interested job seekers into actual applicants.
By creating a brand that accurately conveys your company culture, job seekers will be more likely to click “apply.” You can showcase your culture through employee testimonials and videos, intriguing job descriptions, and engaging social media content. None of this content has to be expensive or film-quality, but it must be authentic.
Are your job descriptions turning off any groups of candidates?
It’s also critical to look more specifically at your job descriptions for potential problems. Start by evaluating them for biased language. Often, job postings use language that is unconsciously filled with masculine language, which alienates female applicants. There are many tools on the market to help with this evaluation.
Another area to review is your job qualifications. Make sure required skills and experience are truly mandatory, rather than nice-to-haves. For example, many jobs require a bachelor’s and master’s degree when someone could actually do the job with enough years of professional experience. Requiring these degrees might rule out an amazing candidate who was not able to afford college, so they started working right away.
By reevaluating your language and your qualifications, you can open up the door for candidates who might have previously been scared off.
Sourcing
The next area to evaluate regularly should be your sourcing methods. When your team researches and reaches out to passive job seekers, you open up the possibility for candidates who might not have thought to apply to your company before.
Keep track of these metrics quarter over quarter, and year over year, to measure your progress:
- Response rates of email and LinkedIn InMail
- Time to hire
Ask yourself these questions each quarter to evaluate your sourcing strategies:
How can you improve your candidate communication?
According to a 2018 study by Phenom, 84% of companies lack personalization in their candidate experiences. Stand out from the competition by personalizing your sourcing communication.
Spend some extra time learning about a potential candidate before hitting send, and incorporate it into your message. Show a candidate why they would benefit from the role you’re filling. With the extra focus on personalization, your response rates should increase.
How can your team collaborate more effectively?
Sourcing can often feel like a solitary effort. You conduct your searches and send email after email, all on your own. But you can really kick your sourcing up a notch by making it a more collaborative process.
Invest in a collaboration tool to help your team share talent with each other. Whether it’s an enhancement to your applicant tracking system (ATS) or another tool altogether, being able to effectively share candidate pools with other recruiters saves your team time.
You might also look into a tool to keep track of “silver medal” talent who might be great for a different role in the future. Your team can use this as a database to start all of their searches in the future. Ideally, the talent captured in this platform would already be interested in your company, so your response rates among that group should be higher.
Effective collaboration and organization tools are critical for your future WFH hiring strategies. In a virtual environment, your team will grow to rely on them.
Applications
Some of the most effective changes to your hiring strategies can come from evaluating your application process. This data tells you who is applying to your jobs and whether or not they are the talent you were actually targeting.
Keep track of these metrics quarter over quarter, and year over year, to measure your progress:
- Ratio of application starts to completed applications
- Ratio of applications to interviews
- Volume of applications per job over time
- Volume of applications from diverse candidates
- Ratio of diverse applications to interviews
Ask yourself these questions each quarter to evaluate your application process:
What qualities are your applicants lacking?
If you’re unhappy with the ratio of applicants who are qualified enough for the interview stage, you may have to improve your application to attract the right job seekers. Take a look at the jobs where you had the highest rates of unqualified applicants. Evaluate the trends in qualifications these candidates lacked. Apply these learnings to your employer brand and sourcing efforts.
Revisit your job description to make sure the missing qualities are clear and placed more prominently. Remove any qualifications you’ve realized are not important. Update your search terms when sourcing to reflect these changes. As you tweak the job posting, your number of qualified candidates should increase.
Additionally, you should also revisit the employer brand steps if you realize your volume of diverse applicants is low. Changes in those steps will be reflected in your application metrics.
What do you wish your ATS did better? How could it make your job easier?
Another impact to your measure of qualified talent might lie in your ATS. If your system is overwhelmed with thousands of applications per job, quality talent might be getting lost in the shuffle. Evaluate your ATS on a regular basis to determine what other platforms and apps you might integrate or replace to make your team more successful.
Interviews
Even the interview stage should be part of your regular evaluation each quarter. If your recruitment team provides an increasingly-high volume of candidates to interview, yet the volume of hires stays constant, you may have a problem.
Keep track of these metrics quarter over quarter, and year over year, to measure your progress:
- Volume of interviews
- Volume of hires
- Ratio of interviews to hires
- Ratio of diverse interviews to hires
- Time to hire
Ask yourself these questions each quarter to evaluate your interview process:
Are you asking the right questions?
If your hiring managers are regularly dissatisfied with the slate of candidates you provide, it might be time to revisit the questions you’re asking in your screening interviews. Spend time surveying hiring managers to understand the gaps between your candidates and their expectations.
Once you understand the gaps, evaluate your questions. For example, your questions may be too focused on technical skills and not enough on soft skills. You may be asking too many situational questions and no behavioral questions. Once you’ve determined the right combination, update your hiring strategies accordingly.
Are there more efficient ways you could be interviewing?
Additionally, the interview process may be in need of some updates. For example, you may gain a better understanding of the candidates through one-way video interviews, rather than your traditional phone screening. This method gives you more insight into a candidate, and you can share it right with the hiring team for further feedback. This type of interview also saves your team valuable time.
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