Protect your Recruitment Budget

Protect your recruitment budget and achieve better staff retention, many companies end up double dipping their recruitment budget each year. They hire someone and in short order need to replace them again, out of the same budget and budget cycle. Staff retention has a lot to do with making the right hiring decision in the first place. Having the right process in place helps greatly, not all hiring managers get it right, it can take decades of experience. That’s why we use and rely on the HR professionals and recruiters, they are the professionals, who validate your choice so listen to them. They are the ones that do it for a living, they are the people that can apply the ‘Blink method’, the people that instinctively know if something is right or not, so use them.

However, we also need the rigour to back up our choice, information and qualification. You may have a candidate who looks and sounds great with a glowing CV or Resume, but it’s just a piece of paper at the end of the day. Someone else could have created it for them. We need to qualify what the CV or Resume says. This can be done by a ‘blinker’ but you still need evidence and that’s where this process comes in.

Putting candidates through a rigorous process, standard Q&A, a face to face interview with in-depth questioning, a psychometric behavioural assessment, to understand better the person you are dealing with and how they work. Is their behaviour a match for what you’re looking for, both their real and situational behaviour? Good evidence systems will justify the hire and provide a level of protect and justification for the hiring managers decision.

Retention

Better retention starts with better hiring, better processes, getting the right people involved in the hiring process. Use the experience you have available (hiring managers who have proven themselves, even in another department) your senior HR people, and most importantly your recruitment partner. Invariably they are the ‘blink’ people, they can instinctively recognise the real thing from the phoney, but they will even reach for the evidence systems, to validate and back up the feelings that they have, some call it belt and braces, but it invariably works.

Save time

If your recruitment partner has delivered a good shortlist of ‘blinked’ candidates and then provided the evidence, including a short video, Q&A, as well as a behavioural assessment, the client face to face process can be shortened. An excellent recruitment partner can save you a huge amount of time in finding and hiring the best people. Enabling you to only need to do an final face to face interviews, then cull this crop and invite 2 or 3 candidates back for a second round and presentation.
If this goes well, with the additional collateral you already have, this evidence along with the final face to face interview should be enough to hire the right candidate.

Behavioural Assessment

Using psychometric behavioural assessments puts in place three levels of hiring assessment,

i.) Skills               ii.) Experience                      iii.) Behaviour

Most companies only hire on two levels of assessment typically i.) Skills and ii.) Experience and end up firing on behaviour. Use all three in the hiring process, do a “job fit” for the behaviour you are looking for, for the role and get potential candidates to do a behavioural assessment. Those that match are the ones likely to end up in the short list that you will hire from. This will become very important in a post Coronavirus world, you can no longer get wrong, but need to get it right first time.

The Guarantee

Another way to help retention and stop double dipping the recruitment budget is to get some form of guarantee from your recruitment partner if you lose a hire. Find a company that is willing to stand by the work that they do for you, who will guarantee the work they deliver; it may cost a tad more but worth it. This is something William Howard Associates Limited offers, others will do the same, free replacement over 12-month period.

Do’s & don’ts
Don’t work with generalists, or the ‘seat of the pants’ firms, the ‘we can do anything’ mob, spend time developing a relationship with a true recruitment partner, not a vendor relationship. Those firms will drop you fast when the market gets tough out there and as resources get tight, you need a good Retained Recruitment Partner. A Partner that will spend the time to understand your business and find those ‘AAA’ candidates you need and who will put the rigour in, to help deliver better retention and help protect your recruitment budget.