Recruitment is a constant balancing act between not hiring underqualified candidates, and not rejecting the qualified ones. With such high stakes, it’s both surprising and worrying how poor many hiring and assessment practices are out there.
So, given the complexities of recruitment, how can organizations ensure that their process is effective and that they are hiring the people they want and need?
This is where evaluating your recruitment setup can be invaluable.
In this blog post I’d like to give you a glimpse of how Future Perfect can help you review your recruitment process. While the exact scope of a BUPLAS evaluation will depend on the issues organizations are struggling with, we generally look at these three key areas:
- Process efficiency – are time and resources being wasted?
- Assessment criteria – are the right skills being tested reliably?
- Profiling ability – are people being put in the right roles?
PROCESS EFFICIENCY
One of the main goals for process efficiency is to ensure that time and resources are always maximized. To analyse this, we look at pass rates, stage order, and results management.
Pass Rates
Assessments and interviews early in the process need to remove candidates who are highly likely to fall out at the latter stages. HR aspects such as attrition risk, salary expectations, qualifications should be covered at this stage, as well as basic communicative ability. All these should be automated as much as possible, through the use of an application form or automated assessment, rather than a time-consuming interview.
Stage Order
Assessment order should ideally follow a funnel, with pass rates gradually decreasing as an applicant moves through the process. Depending on the purpose of the assessment, very high pass rates suggest that the test is a waste of time and not effective at screening out applicants.
However, with a pay-per-test model for outsourced assessments, the tendency will always be to place these assessments at the end of the process to save money. If previous stages have not effectively screened out applicants, then the final stage can actually be where many candidates fail, resulting in wasted time and resources up until that point.
For this reason, a license approach to your outsourced assessments may be the best option, giving you near-unlimited use of the assessment tool.
Results Management
Data and results management can be critical, not just from a record-keeping point of view, but also in helping identify bottlenecks and problems with the recruitment flow.
Frequently, a paper-based system can be slow, error prone, and only provides a restricted view of what is happening at any point.
Using an online system to not only track applicants but also host assessments and other information, allows anyone in the company to view results and feedback on individuals, and the recruitment team as a whole. Daily, weekly and month reports can be easily tailored and generated according to your needs, again saving you time and money.
ASSESSMENT CRITERIA
As part of the audit, we look at what exactly is being assessed and how this correlates to the skills needed in operations. For example, assessing communication means looking at the full spectrum of skills, not just grammatical accuracy or accent.
Future Perfect’s research through BUPLAS has shown that aspects such as structure and flow, tone, being able to build empathy and so on are far more important indicators of performance.
Not only do you need to be looking at the right skills, you also need to be measuring them accurately and reliably. Having clear assessment frameworks and standardised tasks means you can be confident in your assessment results, removing the need to assess the same skills multiple times.
In addition, being explicit about what is being measured, and how it is being measured ensures alignment across your organisation. A BUPLAS evaluation will involve looking at your assessment criteria, and talking to your assessment team to understand how it works in practice, and what, if any opportunities there might be to improve it.
PROFILING ABILITY
Not only should your recruitment process tell you who to hire and who not to, it should also help you place people with the right skills in the right jobs. Not only will they perform better, but they’ll be happier too and less likely to quit.
So what does this look like in recruitment?
Take for example communication skills. It’s important that your assessment gives you results for each area of language and communication and not just an overall score. For example, a candidate who is able to empathise and has appropriate tone and register is likely to do well in accounts where relationship building is important – maybe a sales account or working in collections.
One client that Future Perfect works with had an initial language assessment to help decide between who should go into a high profile sales account, or those who should go into a very routine customer service account. The difference came down to making 2 errors with pronunciation vs. 4 errors – hardly a reliable or valid indicator of sales ability!
In addition, skills test should be directly correlated with the skills required on the job. For example, a skills test for technical support or sales should test those skills, not knowledge of sales terms. Testing only knowledge does not indicate ability, and may exclude very good applicants who don’t have knowledge of sales terminology, but are well suited to a sales environment. If that knowledge is required, it can be easily covered in training, whereas skills training takes more time and investment.
CONCLUSION
Huge amounts of money, time, and resources are being invested in recruitment, and that is why it is important to ensure that your hiring process is effective. By evaluating your recruitment process using the three criteria I have listed, you can be sure that you are maximizing resources, testing the right skills reliably, and putting people in the right roles.
Not sure where or how to start? Simply enlist the help of Future Perfect’s team of experts. With a free evaluation, we will observe your recruitment process and create a report for you with detailed findings and recommendations. We will also work with you on the best way to implement these moving forward. Get a head start by signing up now for a free evaluation.
