It’s Not Just About Recruiting Faster, it’s Recruiting Faster and Better

In human resources (HR) technology, we are often focused on delivering streamlined solutions. We are going for speed. However, speed alone does not always translate into time savings.

Think of your hiring process as moving talent from one bin into the next, with the “finish line” being an employee’s 90-day anniversary. You will get maximum value if you think about how you will move people through the bins, rather than focusing solely on loading up one bin as quickly as possible.

Talent acquisition should not just be faster. It should be faster and better. The goal is to create efficient processes that bring in candidates, who have the best odds of doing well in the job.

To understand how “speed” and “time savings” do not always go hand-in-hand, think about the difference between what you put in versus what you are getting out. Start with some simple math.  

Let us say you are a franchise group that focuses on achieving a high volume of candidates for entry-level hourly roles. You know the ripple effects of being understaffed, so you are eager to get those numbers as high as possible. You meet with success on that metric, with 100 applications a week. You might think: that is not bad, eh?
 
What happens next? If you require candidates to create a login or you add in other complexities, 60% are likely to disappear. You are down to 40 interview slots booked. These days, easily 50% of a standard pool of candidates will be no-shows for those interviews, so that leaves you with about 20 candidates who show up (and 20 wasted bookings).

So the pool of 100 potential hires shrunk pretty quickly, with the likely need for additional spending to convince those who get an offer to sign on. From there, more obstacles: getting the “yeses” to show up on day one, and then navigating those early hires through the critical first 90 days.

Generating a high volume of candidates can be fraught with inefficiency. You can think of the result as “candidate churn.” As you probably know all too well, that means you are wasting time and money.

When you are hiring at or near the entry level, it can be difficult to distinguish among candidates based on work history or technical expertise — nearly half of America’s minimum wage workers are just 16-24 years old. Often, the predictors of success will instead come from “soft skills,” or the ways an individual’s personality shapes how they approach the workday. Think of the rookie in customer service, who stays calm and thinks on their feet. The sales representative, who is a fierce competitor. The crew member, who loves fast-paced repetition.

It’s a simple question. What makes a person a top performer in a job? Alternatively, what are the red flags? This type of analysis is an underused resource. A LeadershipIQ study found that only 15% of companies have defined what attitudes make their highest performers successful, and 34% haven’t addressed the issue at all.

An effective HR tech stack equips you with a two-pronged approach.
 

As you look into solutions for high-volume hiring, make sure they help you every step of the way. That’s how you do faster, better.

At Paradox, we have a team of behavioral scientists dedicated to helping you understand your open positions and how to predict success on the job. We investigate everyday tasks, expectations, organizational structure, and the rhythms of the typical workday. Then we leverage insights from organizational psychology to understand how these realities align with personality. For example, does the job require up-front training? You are looking for someone with high “openness” who readily accepts updates to their knowledge and approaches.

If you understand who is a good bet to succeed, you can tailor your “pitch” to those individuals. Your goal is to attract candidates who enter the process with more buy-in. Educate the talent pool well enough that the best-fit candidates will self-select into your candidate stream.

One way to do this is to utilize informative job descriptions that preview what the job is really like. Consider creating a video that depicts a “day in the life.” When you send out that “Now Hiring” alert to your passive talent pool, think less about general job perks and more about the characteristics that people who love the job tend to have.
 

When you get more information out there to help everyone understand the job, you will attract candidates who are more likely to be “stickier” through the hiring process. These candidates know what an ordinary workweek looks like, and they want it.

Instead of a pool of 100 low-information candidates that reduces down by 80% before you can send out offers, you will have a leaner corps of candidates with accurate expectations of the job. That will likely help reduce candidate churn. Why? Survey data demonstrate the power of expectations: 48% of workers report leaving a job because it didn’t align with their expectations, including 73% of Gen Z respondents. Given this, why squander resources recruiting a creative “big ideas” kind of person to apply for your “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” role? Mismatches fuel turnover, and there is no reason why you can not stave them off before you invest those resources.

So, let us recap. Use behavioral science and data analytics to identify the personality profiles of individuals with the best odds of succeeding in a job role. Then, tailor your focus to attract people who will thrive in the role. That is preventing mismatches.

What is the second major step? Deploying fast data capture to turn the soft skills of your candidates into an objective metric. That is detecting the best matches.

The key is a solution that tells you about fit without slowing things down.

 

 

There is science that can help out here too. You can leverage what we have learned about how humans brains take in information. For example, an MIT-led research team found that people can detect and remember information about a never-before-seen visual image after exposure as brief as 13 milliseconds. With that in mind, you can recognize the fastest way to gather data from people: use images.

Today’s assessment technology from Paradox does just that.

It is now possible to gain personality data with little lift from the candidate, in either time or effort. That moves soft skills data from far down the funnel to the top of it. When you compare an individual candidate’s profile to an ideal profile for a job role, you have got an easy-to-use match score that gives you a bird’s eye view of everyone, including how applicants compare to each other.

That makes it easier to distinguish one candidate from another out of that entry-level pool. And remember — people who fit poorly with the job are less likely to enjoy the job, and, therefore, have a higher potential to leave in the early days. Receiving an early warning signal of this likelihood benefits everyone.

Together, we will take a data-driven approach to who you recruit, and give your job descriptions a productive refresh. Then we will unlock the power of data with the folks who click “Apply,” so you have got a metric that helps you find your best fits.

It is not just faster, it is faster and better. Our hospitality client saw a 54% decline in involuntary turnover. Your organization too deserves to employ people who are happy to be there. There are good-fit employees out there for every job. We will help you find yours.

This article first appeared here.

Dr. Rachel Stewart Johnson is a Psychologist at Paradox. Dr. Rachel came to HR technology in 2018 from a background in human development. At Paradox, she focuses on research and development as part of the Psychology team for Traitify by Paradox. She has a particular interest in developing tools that enhance employee engagement. Prior to diving into behavioral science in enterprise software, Rachel spent many years in the classroom, teaching at the University of California, San Diego, and earning her doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Stanford University.  Visit www.paradox.ai  Connect Rachel Stewart Johnson