Careful Hiring Can Reduce Turnover
Turnover is expensive. There is the “double whammy” of hiring costs spent in vain, productivity lost, and new recruiting and training costs to be incurred. Further, the cost of turnover – including recruiting for replacements – is estimated at around $1 trillion annually in the US. According to an article in “Behavioral Scientist,” most companies do not put their “best foot forward” in their recruiting processes – including in those that claim to value their employees. Regarding their recruiting/hiring process, the article says the following:
What one will find (or may already have experienced firsthand) is a bureaucratic quagmire that fails to live up to the expectations of the people trying to get hired or the people doing the hiring.
Those searching for jobs have to navigate incomplete information about the role, the team, and the organization. They have to interpret ambiguous hiring criteria and opaque decision-making processes. They have to put up with automated, boilerplate communication, if communication comes at all.
Those tasked with hiring often are no better off. They have to muddle through poorly defined hiring protocols and timelines. They regularly receive little to no guidance on how to review applications fairly or conduct unbiased interviews. They have to sit through tedious evaluation rounds that can take months.
Summarizing the article’s recommendations for the recruiting process yields the following:
Hiring teams not aligned: multiple interviewers each have their own agenda, not coordinating with each other or with a central figure; overall lack of coordination/organization.
Lack of agreed-upon timeline for interview team decision and for responses to candidates.
Insufficiently-defined evaluation criteria and role of the position within the organization.
No steps taken to avoid biases around race, gender, class, etc.
Little-to-no coordination of interview contents, evaluation criteria, interview length, etc.
Poor communication, both among interview team members and with candidates regarding outcomes.
Their recommendations to cope with the above problems are the following:
Select “Hiring Team” members based upon expertise required for each open position, prospective co-worker of new hire, and ability to provide varied perspectives of needs of open position.
Hiring team determines competencies (mandatory vs. optional) needed in open position.
Eliminate demographic information from applications/resumes shared with team to avoid bias.
Structure the decision-making process: first, individual evaluations, then team discussions.
Focus interview questions on candidates’ actual experience and/or reactions to real-life scenarios, e.g., how they would conduct a case study, confront a problem, etc.
Ensure consistent, clear communication with each candidate throughout entire process.
Results of implementing the above were uniformly positive – both for candidates and for the internal team. Their overall result enabled them to post the following: “Every organization claims to put people first. The ones that succeed are those whose processes prove it.”
