How Do You Know if Your Recruiting Process Is Broken?

Photo credit: AP | The Manhattan skyline remains dark after Hurricane Sandy, as seen from Williamsburg in Brooklyn. (Oct. 29, 2012)

With the vivid images of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy front of mind it seemed appropriate to draw an analogy for this week’s blog. (Not by the way to diminish the situation).

Over the 20 years I have spent in the recruiting industry, I have had the good fortune to work with some great companies whose recruiting function worked like a well-oiled machine. They are strategic in their approach, thoughtful in how they plan their strategy and have a hiring process in place that makes the candidate ready to jump at the opportunity. Sadly, there are many more companies who’s process is broken and they do not even realize it.

How do you know when your recruiting process is broken? According to a recent article published by Haidar Hadi, Product Marketing Manager, at BonitaSoft, there are seven signs companies should look for:

: If your turnover is high then you are not recruiting the right people. Performance metrics should be reviewed when building the interview questions.

: Recruiters should have a pipeline of qualified candidates and build relationships with passive candidates that might be right for future opportunities. This prevents each new hire from being a start from scratch type of project. You already have people that you know are qualified to reach out to.

Posting, screening, interviewing and managing the overall process is time consuming and costly. Post wisely, leverage your network, automate where you can and make good use of your recruiting time to identify candidates rather than being buried in busy work.

If you have multiple stakeholders it is important to make sure that you have a process in place that allows for collaboration in selecting the right candidate.

: Limit the number of candidates you present and make certain the candidate is fully qualified so that the interviewer can interview for talent as opposed to qualifications. Interviewers should be provided with structured questions. Most managers are not experts in interviewing and need guidance.

If your interview process is set up properly there should never be any questions around legal issues. Interviews need to be conducted properly, documented properly and candidate selection based on the best candidate for the job.

Make sure you have an easy way to compare candidate qualifications possibly in a table format so at a glance you can pull the best to move forward.

There are a number of points made around this subject ~ including another article sighting seven similar signs. Forbes offers what they say is the 15 Minute Fix to Your Recruiting Problems.Regardless of which points in your process that are broken the results are the same. If you do not take a hard look at your processes and fix what is broken in your recruiting process you will remain stalled in the storm and miss out on good talent.