The pursuit of top talent isn’t just an immediate goal hiring managers face in their efforts to satisfy their companies’ internal needs. That pursuit is also the ongoing challenge they have for meeting the evolving expectations of their customer base over time.
Consider the case of Gateway Engineers, Just last year, the civil engineering firm was looking for a way to build long-term customer satisfaction within its employee network. But the firm, based in Pittsburgh, faced a challenge: learning what to do to hire more “A” players.
Given that challenge, Gateway changed its hiring process. It opted for an applicant-tracking system (ATS) to create more dynamic job descriptions. The ATS also gave the company greater confidence in its quality of hire when its employees reached out to their networks about open positions.
Employee networking fuels a remarkable number of successful hires. In fact, a February 2016 LinkedIn study of HR managers surveyed found that 85 percent of jobs at the companies surveyed had been filled by networking.
While such referrals made candidates easier to find, Gateway used its ATS as a forward-thinking move to hire better candidates. As a result, the firm made better hiring decisions, boosted company morale and more easily transitioned new hires to quickly meet the demands of its growing ranks.
Gateway had a good experience with its new applicant-tracking system. But an ATS alone cannot guarantee success in hiring the best quality talent. Here are four additional methods hiring managers can use to be “forward-thinkers” during the step that follows the initial one of finding good candidates.
That next step, of course, is the interview process:
Strive for consistency.
An inconsistent interview process can lead to the hiring of bad candidates. The Brandon Hall Group published a study, The True Cost of a Bad Hire, in 2015, finding that 69 percent of companies surveyed identified a broken review process as the “greatest impact on the quality of a hire.”
The solution to building a good interview process, then, is to make sure it’s consistent. Managers should use scorecards that have a “benchmark” comparison for all potential new hires. Metrics should be used in the evaluation but shouldn’t be overdone.
Finally, whoever is evaluating the candidates should ensure that the metrics can’t be easily…