You need the right people for your business to grow, or more importantly, increase profit. Without understanding the common pitfalls in a recruiting strategy, you may find yourself wasting resources to include time and money while the competition leaves you in the dust. By focusing on the 3 V’s – volume, velocity, and value – it is proven your recruiting efforts will increase impact and the CEOs favorite word – profitability!
Three V’s of a Successful Recruiting Strategy
- You need a manageable volume of quality resumes.
Hiring managers often request recruiters to provide as many resumes as possible. This is a problematic and costly strategy.
High volume submittals make it difficult to operate lean. While you’re reviewing resumes (the majority of which you will reject), the recruiter is still out there working on a search you may have decidedly changed based on initial submittals. In addition to the time it takes to review them, is the hiring manager following up to reject candidates? Is your recruiter protecting your brand if you’re leaving that task up to them? Either way, someone is wasting time, and thus money.
We recommend a hiring manager accepts 3 candidates at a time for review. This gives you the opportunity to give useful feedback and change your search. It also forces your recruiters to submit only the best candidates they find, leaving you with less resume clutter. We also recommend using 1 trusted recruiting partner or a max of 2-3 headhunters to save time managing submittals.
- Establish a system and monitor velocity.
It’s a candidate market so you need to act quickly and make decisions before another company sweeps your candidate off his/her feet. Your recruiter should be monitoring the velocity of your hiring process– time is money and you need to grow. Develop a pipeline process. For example:
Candidate applies> screen call> hiring manager phone screen> assign a project> in-person interview> reference check> offer letter
Identify the members of your team responsible for each stage and hold them accountable to provide feedback to the recruiter and/or candidate within 48 hours. If you start to notice candidate drop-off at a stage examine it and alter the process. Changes you make to streamline your process should always improve the bottom line. The faster you deliver/receive feedback on candidates, the more bandwidth you’ll have for new submittals- keeping each stage manageable and overall time-to-hire significantly shorter.
- Consider the value in your process: both with number and standards.
Keeping an eye on are your cost per hire and average time to hire, both affect your bottom line. Time per hire may be more difficult to quantify but is worth monitoring. The more manpower devoted to the hiring process, the less bandwidth your team will have to devote to your company’s profitability. Internally, review your pipeline process and be certain that all steps in your hiring process are necessary and valuable. The “this is how we’ve always done it” mentality is a costly one. Inspect your process, check your numbers, alter your process to spend smarter, repeat.
Your recruiter is the first impression a candidate has of the inner workings of your company. Your process should not only reflect your values as a company but also provide a valuable experience for the candidate. The hiring team is responsible for providing a fruitful experience for the candidate. Hiring is an opportunity to build your brand. Superfluous steps in your process can send your candidate over to your competitor. When rejecting candidates, don’t use a canned response, give them feedback. They will see you’re a brand that cares and that you respect their time–leaving them with the impression that you are a company they would still work for someday. Who knows, maybe someday you’ll want them.
A recruiter is an ambassador with huge value add potential. Carefully select who you decide to represent your brand. Ask for references or use trusted recommendations that can speak to a positive candidate experience. Note that hiring an internal recruiter is often NOT always the most cost effective solution.
Your Habits of Profitability™ Team
It’s a story we are all too familiar with as CEOs and business leaders:
- I can’t seem to find the right talent
- I want my team to think about profitability just as much as I do
- I want a team to empower our business
- I have one or two sales reps who are killing it, why can’t I find another
We encourage a culture of Value-Driven Decision Making and too many times we have seen major issues with finding the right new team member in sales, development, marketing, etc. Building your team is critical to building your business and high growth success. How you decide to do that directly impacts your ability to scale, stabilize, and increase profitability. Most importantly, the core performance team from executives to sales is proven to be far more successful when each is empowered to drive towards the business financial goals. If you want to maximize profitability, you need total alignment between your core decision-makers and total empowerment to allow those front-line decision makers to innovate and problem solve for you.
This is why we really like what FoundHuman is doing. They are hyper-focused on finding talent that delivers today and tomorrow. They take an approach beyond skills, and in a high growth business or desired high growth environment, this is key. This increases the stability of your business and ultimately the CEOs ability to maximize profitability through confidence in their team.