The Hiring Process and You

Is your hiring process yielding the desired results? or it lacks altogether. Businesses have never done as much hiring as they do today and have never done a worse job of it, says Peter Cappelli of Wharton. so, it is really a time to understand & evaluate how efficient your hiring process is. The hiring process consists of technical, commercial, and support-process elements that ensure the maximum qualitative output. It is often misunderstood as a sequence of activities when it is not.

Let's check a few Key Parameters and Analytics to check the efficiency of your hiring process.

1) Prepare before you Act.

• Are you checking before you begin recruiting?
• The Market Survey. (Have you checked what is market availability in comparison to your vacancy expectations? 
• The content (such as the tasks) making up the job?
• What is the expected output from an employee? (work hours, number of clients, etc)
• How it fits into your organizational structure?
• What are the skills and personal attributes needed to perform the role effectively?
• Availability of a qualifying Interviewer with interviewing skills.

2) Identifying Productive Sources via Hiring Analytics.

• Learn from where to attract suitable talent which often fits your organizational needs by tracking and analyzing the source of hire data.

3) Check your overall internal satisfaction.

• The most theoretically claimed but practically neglected important parameter. This parameter helps you in ways beyond measurement. For the topic, understand the difference of objectivity which will differ from your hiring manager to the HR department and your leadership. Thus, it is important to access and bring all the stakeholders on the same page. This can be done by Feedback Surveys, constant evaluation of your hiring process as per the objectivity of an individual requirement. Understanding the capabilities & limitations.

4) Benchmark the Skills

• Benchmark the skills that you require in comparison to your existing available resources against the years of experience and technological expertise level. This needs to be done for every technology that you work upon to identify different benchmarks on different levels and expertise. This will help you to identify what you have on hand and what your requirements are.
• This can be done by an in-house technical test on each level creating a skill matrix pool. Which needs to be evaluated yearly or so to ensure the effectiveness and constant change as per your business needs.

5) Time to Fill and Time to hire.

• Time to fill in the amount of time you need to fill a position. For example, if you hired for three roles, with 20, 30, and 40 days time to fill respectively, then your average time to fill is 20+30+40/3 = 30 days. This calculation should refer to the same time period.
• Time to Hire measures the time between the moment your eventual hire entered your pipeline (through sourcing or application) and the moment they accepted your job offer. This metric indicates how fast you spotted your best candidate and moved them across the job’s pipeline.
• (Time to Hire = Day candidate accepted the offer – Day candidate entered the pipeline)
• *Most talented people are off the market in 10-12 days.

6) Interview Conversion Ratio.

• This means how many candidates you churn to convert & Schedule 1 candidate for the interview. This ratio may seem simple at first hand however, it has very important stats to give for your organization. How? Well, you need to know or be vigilant about what are the reason candidates are declining to appear for the interview. Is it the Vacancy? or Interest? or Your organization's brand image! It is often found and observed that those with poor organizational reviews and lower employee satisfaction ratio has a lower Interview conversation ratio and higher offer blackout and early attrition ratio. Now, this is definitely not good as you have to recruit from the same market and that recruitment has to be of a mutual choice not one-sided.

7) The most important Ratios of the hiring process.

• For this, you need to collect the data at each stage of the recruitment.
• Called But Not Interested Vs. Called & Interested (Churn)
• Churn to Reject Ratio
• Churn to Offer Ratio
• Churn to Tech1 Ratio
• Churn to Tech2 Ratio
• Churn to Tech3 Ratio
• Churn to HR Reject
• Churn to Backout Ratio
• Offer to Join Ratio
• Offer to Offer Not Accepted Ratio
• Offer to Offer Backout Ratio

8) Total Cost Per Hire.

• This means tracking the total cost per hire. This will give you an insight into the quality hires you have made. This can also be compared to the existing resource you have to determine the difference and identifying change and upscaling needs.
• The hiring cost includes but is not limited to:
• Recruiters’ Salaries 
• Background check service.  
• Investment on tools
• Agency fees 
• Advertising costs 
• Internal recruiting costs 
• Assessment tools 
• Hours spent at each stage 
• Travel Expenses 
• Relocation Cost 
• Salary hikes paid
• The cost incurred due to delay in hire or loss of work hours in absence.
• Infrastructure Cost.
• Other Miscellaneous Expenses

9) Attrition Rate

• There are two types of attrition rates. i.e. Monthly Attrition Rate & Early Attrition Rate
• Early Attrition Rate = Candidates leaving the job (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) shortly after being hired. This rate doubles the recruitment cost as it will add training, efforts, and time being invested post-hiring.
• Attrition Rate = Divide the number of employees who separate from the company by the total number of employees working during that time period.

10) Check External Satisfaction

• It is of utmost importance to check what is your companies candidate experience. Candidates that have a positive recruiting and onboarding experience are more likely to accept a position and to remain with the company. Also, this is an important factor affecting your organizational brand image. In today's world where electronic media & platforms play a very crucial role in branding and creating an image and these platforms are often being driven by individuals who have the direct or indirect experience, reviews, opinions with or for your organization.

11) Importance of Data Analysis & Data Mining.

• By this, we gather & analyze previously known data and information for the present and future output, trends, and actionable. Thus it is of the utmost importance to not only maintain the data in one standard format & terms but also to keep a constant audit & corrections so that it can be utilized for mining. Such advanced analytical approaches can be used to predict job market fluctuations and to develop a system suiting your needs, identifying key areas & trends, take corrective measures, and avoid common mistakes for better output. Also, this can be utilized for futuristic technologies such as machine learning to automize the Recruitment process as it needs data and trends to identify and function.
• Do always remember, data, stats, trends are there to help your judgement not make you dependent on it. Thus, always relay on the practical and applicable approaches matching your current need.

Do remember that processes are as good as the people managing and following it. Thus, it always needs to be

• Simple
• Robust
• Documented
• Controlled (Audited)
• Communicated
• Error-Proofed (Time to Time)

The Key is to ensure continuous check & improvement with respect to your changing business needs and make it mature to meet the challenges of your business.

The implementation of the process is the most difficult task as it drives you and your teammates out of the comfort zone and your ordinary routine. However, once implemented it reduces the time, effort, and cost and maximizes the qualitative output.