How often do you or your team go with your gut and subsequently make a bad hire? How much does a bad hire cost your business? Thousands of dollars? Tens of thousands? Forbes suggests it could cost over a hundred million.
On average, the cost of a bad hire is about one-third of that employee’s annual salary. It’s easy to see how a string of bad hires can add up quickly.
If you want to avoid making a bad hire, you and your team should consider recruiting employees using evidence-based recruiting instead of relying on gut feelings. The first step is to look at what you’re currently doing.
Examining Your Current Recruitment Process
Your recruitment process is a huge determining factor in the quality of your employees. Before you can make changes to it, you have to look at your current process.
Take time to look at your process and see how well it’s working. Job vacancy time, time from the initial screen to job acceptance, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and turnover rates indicate how strong or weak your current recruitment process is.
Go through these five points and compare your numbers to industry averages and standards. If they fall below average, you may be making hiring decisions based on gut feeling rather than relying on hard evidence.
1. Vacancy Fill Time
The purpose of an employee giving a two-week notice is that you should be able to get a head start on a replacement during that time. If, however, it’s taking you far longer to fill job vacancies, then you may have a problem with your recruitment process.
In some cases, this could be that there is an abundance of applicants, and it’s challenging to sift through them all.
You’ll also want to consider the time between the initial screening of the candidate and the actual start date. Is the interview process too cumbersome? Are there too many decision-makers involved? Is there a sense of urgency for those involved to be engaged with their part of the process?
If this process is emotionally-draining and too time-consuming for your team, you’re probably relying too much on your intuition and not enough evidence.
2. Employee Satisfaction
If you’re not already doing so, you should be checking to see how satisfied your employees are with their jobs. If they’re unhappy, the problem could lie with your hiring process in that you’re not getting the right people in the first place.
Look for passionate people about your industry and have the skills to back up their enthusiasm. Try to avoid hiring people that are over-qualified for positions. Overqualified professionals can end up feeling bored because they’re not challenged enough.
Consider engaging a survey provider to measure engagement every one or two years. The provider takes care of the logistics, and the software and the survey’s results are reported to you on a high level.
Another way to study this aspect is to consider productivity. If your employees are not as productive as they should be, this could be a sign of dissatisfaction within your company.
3. Customer Satisfaction
Are your customers happy with your employees and your company? These are other numbers you need to look at as evidence of how well your current employees are working out.
If you have low levels of customer satisfaction, do what you can to trace this back to your recruitment process. Are you focused on hiring people with customer service skills and experience?
4. Company Turnover Rates
Company turnover rates are, by far, the best way to see how well your current recruitment process is working. If you have a higher-than-average turnover rate for your industry, the root of the problem is most likely in your hiring process.
In many cases, you’re using your gut instinct instead of following an evidence-based recruitment process.
Benefits of Using Facts for Hiring Employees
There are a few benefits that you can gain by using an evidence-based recruitment process. Let’s dive into each of these to fully understand why it’s so important to change the way you think about hiring.
Vacancies Filled More Quickly
If you have a huge stack of applications to go through, it will take a long time to weed out the unqualified individuals and find only those who are ideal for your company.
With evidence-based hiring, you’ll set up parameters and only look at candidates that meet your specifications. These parameters also help take the emotional drain out of looking through seemingly endless applications.
Save Money
As we already mentioned, a bad hire can cost your company thousands of dollars, if not more. Using hard facts to choose the right employee reduces your chances of making a bad hire, which saves you money.
It also saves you time, so you can spend more time focusing on doing the most important things for your business to succeed and thrive instead of trying to make gut decisions about who to hire.
Higher Employee Satisfaction
When you put effort into choosing a candidate that’s right for the job, they’re going to fit in far better than someone that doesn’t quite make the cut that you hired based on personality compatibility.
Consider your current employees as well. A bad hire can put a lot of stress and pressure on them. If you can alleviate these concerns by ensuring all new hires are well-qualified, the overall satisfaction rates should improve.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
With the right employees in place, they will work hard to ensure all of your customers are satisfied. Even those that don’t come into direct contact with your customers can change the customer experience.
For example, factory workers who are passionate about what they do will ensure that every product that comes off the line exceeds quality control standards. This passion is why you need to hire qualified employees at every level of your operation.
Next, we’ll be getting into precisely what the evidence-based recruiting process looks like so you can take full advantage of it.
The Evidence-Based Recruiting Process
Let’s look at what a hiring process looks like when it incorporates evidence-based recruiting into it from the beginning.
Compare this to your current process. If your current approach is vastly different, consider incorporating any of the ideas into your strategy.
1. Identify Predictors of Success
The first thing you need to do is look at what indicates success within your company. Consider what personality traits, skills, and experiences your current highest-performing employees have and use those as a guideline.
Remember that what may have worked for your company a few years ago may not work now. The rapid changes in technology have changed what skills are needed to take a business into the future.
Create numbers to quantify everything as much as possible. These are used to create your candidate persona and set up AI technology, so you only spend time on the best applicants.
2. Create a Candidate Persona
A candidate persona is a semi-fictional picture of what your ideal candidate is.
You should have one for each type of job you have. As you start recruiting for a particular position, you’ll use this to find suitable candidates.
The candidate persona forms define the ideal characteristics, skills, and traits that make up your perfect hire. The candidate persona will help you and your team create more relevant job descriptions and increase desirable applications. It’ll help you understand the top recruiting channels for your target candidates and align your recruiting strategies.
It’s far easier to see how well a person will fit a specific role when comparing them to your candidate persona. The candidate persona also allows you to focus on the exact traits you want in a candidate rather than getting distracted by their personality or other things that don’t matter as much.
3. Only Look at the Best Candidates
You can now leverage AI to help you throughout the hiring process. It can help you find suitable candidates and then weed out ones that don’t have the right qualifications.
You will want to consider setting up surveys as part of an online application process to do this. Based on those responses, an AI program can provide you with a list of only the most qualified candidates, so you don’t have to worry about the rest.
4. Measure Your Success
Follow up with every new hire, their managers, and their co-workers after a few set periods. One follow-up meeting should be within a few weeks of hiring, then another a few months out.
You’ll find out how they’re doing to see how successful your recruitment process was. In most cases, a bad hire will reveal themselves fairly quickly, so you don’t have to waste too much time on post-hiring evaluations.
In some industries, it can be hard to measure an individual’s impact on your overall business. However, having employee engagement software in place will help with this.
You should also evaluate your hiring process with the four points mentioned earlier. Although other factors can change these metrics, putting an evidence-based recruitment process in place should cause you to see these positive changes in each of those areas.
5. Make Adjustments as Needed
As you determine how successful your hiring process was, you can start to make adjustments to it to improve it even more.
Many circumstances are outside of your control, so you’ll never be able to be 100% successful when hiring employees. However, you can reach a success rate that makes sense for your team by improving your process.
Looking for More Evidence-Based Hiring Information?
Below are a handful of evidence-based hiring books that you might find helpful.
1. Evidence-Based Recruiting: How to Build a Company of Star Performers Through Systematic and Repeatable Hiring Practices
From the author:
- A needed wake-up call. — Shane Frederick, Professor of Marketing, Yale School of Management
- The definitive book on recruiting. — Inanc Balci, co-founder of Unicorn Lazada Group
- Talent will increasingly be the primary competitive differentiation between companies. Hiring managers can improve their recruiting results by following the evidence-based methods presented in this book. — Marc Bitzer, CEO, Whirlpool
- You can only produce extraordinary results if you hire exceptional talent. Evidence-Based Recruiting provides essential insights and practical approaches to doing just that. — Jim Williams, Senior Advisor and former Partner, TPG Global
- Evidence-Based Recruiting provides many important and helpful insights to help you recruit, develop, and retain a winning team. — Ron Williams, former Chairman & CEO, Aetna Inc.
Check out the book here.
2. The Recruiter’s Handbook: A Complete Guide for Sourcing, Selecting and Engaging the Best Talent
From the author:
- The Recruiter’s Handbook provides comprehensive, step-by-step guidelines through the complete recruiting process. HR Bartender Sharlyn Lauby, SHRM-SCP, writes the Handbook; with insights, tips, and tools from dozens of HR, recruiting, and business experts, the Handbook delivers a proven roadmap to help shorten learning curves, avoid legal pitfalls and build trust in new hire relationships.
- It shows how to drive cultural change by offering guidelines for veteran, disabled, or ex-offender recruiting efforts, building robust apprenticeship, mentoring, or internship programs, effectively conducting assessments, reference checks, background checks, and much more.
3. The Science of Management: Fighting Fads and Fallacies with Evidence-Based Practice
From the author:
- To enhance the performance of their employees, managers need to reach an extraordinary number of decisions every day based on information and training as well as on their experience and instinct for what is right. But are the assumptions and beliefs behind these decisions always based on objective evidence, or do many follow instead of the latest management fad, personal opinion, anecdotal observation, pseudo-research, or just a dogged preference for the status quo?
- The authors of The Science of Management: Fighting Fads and Fallacies with Evidence-Based Practices have collated and analyzed almost 16,000 scientific research articles in psychology and management to uncover over 800 surprising findings that contradict many standard management practices. This book presents some of these critical discoveries organized around the core management responsibilities of * workplace objectives * team performance * individual performance * addressing undesirable behavior * promoting employee wellbeing * recruitment, and selection.
- Highlighting and redressing these fallacies, the authors offer the reader the opportunity to challenge many sources of bias that contaminate our beliefs and opinions and provoke wrong decisions at work—an excellent read for all those involved in management and supervision from student to professional practitioner level.
How to Recruit Employees That Are Right for Your Company
You know how to find and hire great employees using evidence-based recruiting practices. This process can help you avoid bad hires and find candidates that will stay with your company for many years.
Incorporating more evidence-based decisions into all of your company’s processes will help you make better decisions for your business driven by facts rather than emotions.
If you need help finding suitable candidates for your construction industry job opening utilizing the evidence-based recruiting process, please schedule a consultation today.
About MatchBuilt: We drive to find, attract, and land key talent through evidence-based recruiting for your residential construction home building or building materials company.
View our jobs: Â You can view our current residential construction and building products job openings here.
Partner with us: If you have an open role you are looking to fill, let’s schedule a private consultation today.
Follow us here:Â We update our LinkedIn company page regularly.
