Hiring crisis: don’t neglect these 3 stages

The recruitment sector is busier than ever, with almost every employer under intense pressure to get critical roles filled as fast as possible. Yet with the pandemic, the “Great Resignation”, and candidates enjoying a smorgasbord of choice, we’ve never faced a talent shortage like this.

Candidates are now interviewing you. If you haven’t had applicants actually asking you why they should choose your organisation and role over another, you can rest assured that they’re thinking it—and if they don’t like the answers, they won’t choose you.

So what can you do to ace the reverse interview and set yourself apart from the crowd of employers competing for scarce talent?

In one recent survey on employers’ top hiring priorities for 2022:

?      48% said they wanted to overall recruitment efficiencies

?      44% wanted to find more candidates

?      40% wanted to find candidates faster

?      35% wanted to improve their decision-making processes by making more use of candidate data and insights

?      30% said they knew they were unable to achieve these intentions and were bringing in external recruiters.

Many employers are focusing on employer branding, marketing, and widening their talent pools to achieve these goals. But attracting candidates is only half the battle. If you fail to distinguish yourself during the actual recruitment process, you won’t hold on to good candidates long enough to get their name on a contract.

According to a survey by Aptitude Research:

?      24% of applicants drop out at the screening stage

?      22% drop out at the application stage

?      18% drop out at the assessment stage

?      25% drop out at the interview stage

?      A shocking 9% drop out at the interview/offer stage.

What can employers do to plug this massive leak? Let’s look at the three stages where most candidates are lost.

1. Screening

The quality of your screening process has a dramatic impact on your whole recruitment strategy. Forward-thinking employers are investing in new screening technology to enhance their employer brand and candidate experience and to boost the quality of their hires.

AI and machine learning can be used to automate some of the administrative donkey work of recruitment, including sourcing potential candidates, selecting them from CVs, and even communicating with them – and feed invaluable data and insights back into your overall recruitment process.

1. Assessment

Pre-recruiting assessments include all the tools and technology employers use to assess whether an applicant has the skills and behaviours needed for the role. They typically combine subjective and objective tests to determine the accuracy of hiring decisions.

Pre-recruitment assessments can bring objectivity to recruiting at every level, from the C-suite to the front line. Time-consuming, one-size-fits-all manual tests are now a thing of the past; it’s all about multifaceted insights into skills, cultural fit and potential, with different assessments for different roles and different points in the recruiting process. The findings from these assessments can be used to guide questions at the final stage: interviewing.

Interviewing

It may surprise you that few managers and recruiters are trained to conduct a good interview, and few employers have a standardised approach for how interviews are conducted. With the right tools and practices, interviewing can be a much more powerful and accurate tool to determine the best candidates—and to encourage them to take the job.

Ad-hoc, rambling discussions, multiple interviews, and making decisions on a ‘gut feeling’ are out; consistent, standardised interviews are in, and so are digital interviews that allow multiple interviewers to participate.

Together, these three critical stages form a holistic, strategic approach to recruitment that includes specific technologies, processes and metrics. With recruitment set to get even busier in 2022, these approaches are about to become more crucial than ever.