Better yet…How many stars would your applicants give it? How about your hiring managers? Or your leaders? Your new hires?
All of these ratings matter, so sweat the details. It’s the little things that you do as an organization that make you who you are and have helped you succeed with your customers. Too often, these details get overlooked when it comes to the hiring process. Perhaps you could have gotten away with this when the job market was different. In fact, there’s a good chance that your hiring process was built in (and for) the good ‘ole days when candidates were lining up to work for you. With falling unemployment rates reducing the number of active job seekers, and job aggregators making the job search easier than ever, those days are long gone.
THE FOUR STAKEHOLDERS
It’s a buyer’s market in the job world, and top candidates are discerning buyers. To attract, hire and retain Five Star talent, it is essential to have a Five Star hiring process. This means creating exceptional experiences for all stakeholders involved. Focusing on candidate experience is the right start, but it’s not enough. Your team also needs a great experience, or it won’t be easy for hiring managers to follow the process or for your leaders to hold them accountable. Lastly, new hires need to have an exceptional onboarding experience. Too many companies work hard to attract and hire the right person only to set them up for failure by providing a poor new hire onboarding experience.
Experience impacts actions taken and decisions made, and those decisions will determine the success of your business.
CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE
What They Want: Candidates want an easy way to learn about your company and job openings. They want to get an authentic feel for your culture and what you are truly seeking in your next team member. Then they want to apply to your job posting from their mobile device within a few minutes. Once they have applied, they expect to stay informed on the status of their application.
What They Often Get: Many job postings are generic and lack genuine character. It makes candidates feel like they will be joining the company as an insignificant cog in the machine. For the job seekers who do apply, the process can be arduous, particularly from a mobile device. Candidates often spend 30 minutes or more on applications that include antiquated form fields and a username/password requirement. After they finally click submit, they never hear back from the employer again and are left feeling like their application was zapped into a black hole.
What Has to Change: Candidates have options and the best ones are passing on anything that resembles a potential black hole. To attract Five Star Talent, you must create compelling job postings, distribute your opportunities to places where candidates will find them, and make it easy for candidates to apply from any device. Then follow up in a timely manner and keep candidates informed and engaged throughout the process. Otherwise, top talent will go with employers who do.
MANAGER EXPERIENCE
What They Want: Managers want an easy-to-use system to review and communicate with applicants. They want a hiring process playbook to follow to help them make better decisions. They want the system to work how they work—something that can be accessed from any mobile device since they don’t always do their work from a desk.
What They Often Get: Managers are often forced to track applicants through a combination of paper and email applications or through a hard-to-use software system that is not optimized for mobile devices. If there is an established hiring playbook, it is often stored in a paper binder that is rarely used as part of the actual hiring process. Managers’ time is wasted, and their hiring process is inconsistent. This leads to hiring mistakes.
What Has to Change: If hiring managers don’t have a hiring process that is easy to execute, then they are on their own. Inconsistencies will grow. Candidate experience will decline. Decisions will suffer, and you will see the impact in your business results—employee turnover up, customer satisfaction down, sales and profitability…you know where it goes from here. Give your managers a system to follow that saves them time and produces predictable hiring results.
LEADER EXPERIENCE
What They Want: HR and Operations Leaders want a system that will allow them to implement a hiring playbook and hold their team accountable to executing it. They want to have real-time access to reporting to monitor results and make the necessary adjustments to optimize them.
What They Often Get: Without software systems, leaders are often forced to manage their process through paper binders and their reporting through manually maintained spreadsheets. Executing a consistent hiring process across the organization becomes impossible and wastes valuable resources—especially leaders’ time.
What Has to Change: If leaders are serious about improving their hiring results, they need to build a playbook and integrate it into their managers’ actual hiring process.
NEW HIRE EXPERIENCE
What They Want: Above all else, new hires want to have a great first day at work and come home feeling excited about their new job. For this to happen consistently, the company needs a system to make a great first impression and walk new hires through the onboarding process. There needs to be a plan for new hire orientation and an electronic checklist of items to be completed by the new hire (as well as the manager). This should include an easy-to-use system to complete new hires forms and training items needed to prepare for the new hire to perform.
What They Often Get: New hire onboarding processes are often disorganized and left up to the individual manager. This means that a manager who is busy that day or not well organized could end up leaving a new hire with nothing but a stack of new hire paperwork to complete. This can risk a new hire feeling confused and wondering whether they made the right decision.
What Has to Change: You only get one shot at a first impression with new hires, and the wrong one can lead them right back to the job market. Leaders need to recognize that the hiring process does not end once an offer is accepted. They need to build a system to onboard new hires consistently across the organization. This includes an easy way to get oriented, as well as complete new hire forms and training checklist items.
WHERE TO START
To achieve meaningful change, you must first establish 1) Where you are right now and 2) Where you want to go.
Where You Are Right Now:
- Ask for Feedback/Ratings: Ask the stakeholders (Candidates, Managers, Leaders, New Hires) for their feedback on the process. Include questions about what they like most/least and their ideas on how to improve the process.
- Walk in Their Shoes: You won’t truly know where you are unless you see it for yourself: walk a mile in your key stakeholders’ shoes. Apply to a job. Manage a candidate through the hiring process. Review the reports and dashboards your leaders see. Complete a first day as a new hire. Take notes or even a series of screenshots to map out the process. This will make it easier for you to make a case to improve the process and will help you get organized to document the detailed improvements needed.
- Establish Baseline Metrics: Think of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you will use to measure the effectiveness of your hiring process and experience. Each of the stakeholders needs to be represented by 1-2 KPIs. Keep score of your current performance in these areas so that you know where you are right now.
Where You Want to Go:
- Set the Vision: Create a vision for the experience you want to create as part of your hiring process. Organize this by the four stakeholders so that you can ensure that each of their needs will be addressed.
- Incorporate Internal & External Guidance: Combine the feedback/observations on your current process with ideas and best practices from outside your company. Look at what other companies in your industry are doing, along with ideas from other industries and HR thought leaders.
- Establish Benchmark Targets: Work with your team to establish targets for your KPIs and create a process to continually measure your progress toward them.
Once you know where you are right now and where you want to go, it will be easier to develop a plan to bridge the gap.
One of the biggest challenges our clients tell us they face is creating the consistent processes they need to deliver the predictable hiring results they need.
