Hireology’s Customer Connect program provides an opportunity to bring Hireology advocates together to hear from our team and connect with one another through curated conversations.
In our most recent Customer Connect event — held virtually on May 17, 2023 — we focused on improving quality-of-hire. The event included:
- A keynote on the importance of hiring better quality candidates from Anil Harjani, SVP of Revenue at Hireology
- A look at Hireology product features built for connecting with quality candidates and identifying the very best
- An overview of how the San Diego Padres have used Hireology to identify top candidates among the high volume of applicants they typically receive
Based on the content shared in each of these sessions, we’ve rounded up the top takeaways regarding hiring better quality candidates:
The cost of poor fit hires
The cost of poor fit hires can be detrimental to your organization. A McKinsey study of more than 600,000 workers across a range of sectors found that superior talent is up to 8 times more productive than average talent — to put this another way, one person in the top 1 percent is worth 12 in the bottom 1 percent. Thinking about it this way really shows the deep long-term impact of finding the right person for your open roles.
Similar research has looked into the actual monetary cost of employing average or below-average workers. Most studies find that the cost of a bad hire is around 30% of that employee’s annual salary. So a poor performing employee making $60,000/year costs your organization $18,000 in the costs of poor outcomes and then the general cost of replacing them eventually.
Quality jobs and processes attract quality candidates
Most organizations do understand the importance of quality. The question then becomes, what exactly can you do to connect with and hire the best talent available? The key is understanding that quality attracts quality. What we mean by this is that if you focus on quality yourself — that means creating a quality working culture, designing better quality jobs, and executing quality processes with the candidate in mind — you’re going to naturally attract quality talent.
It’s the same approach you would take with your business or healthcare facility. You want to provide the best quality service, products, or care in order to acquire and retain customers or patients. Your HR and recruiting strategy should be the same. Quality jobs, processes, and culture are always going to help you drive you better hiring and HR outcomes.
Let’s take a closer look.
- Quality culture: More than a third of survey respondents would actually take a lower paying offer if they were confident the company’s culture met their needs. And even more say they are loyal to their existing employer because of the culture. Building a great culture is a top-down effort. You have to determine your organization’s core values and make sure that leadership leads by example in living by those values. It’s also important that leadership is open to feedback and offers an open-door policy for people looking to learn and grow within the organization.
- Quality jobs: The very best candidates are going to be attracted to the very best jobs. That means you need to design jobs that meet the needs of today’s job seekers. In the same survey mentioned above, today’s job seekers want jobs that include flexibility, growth, and fulfillment. Providing these types of benefits again starts with leadership simply making the call to offer them. Then requires your HR team to market these benefits in job descriptions and any other owned channel.
- Quality processes: And finally quality candidates have the upper hand. They do not have to endure slow and inconvenient hiring processes. They can and will pursue the employers that make the process easy. So what does a quality process look like for the candidate? It should happen in less than three weeks (ideally less than two). It should be mobile friendly — meaning candidates can apply on their phones and generally move forward in the hiring process easily on their mobile devices. And finally, it should never require candidates to physically come into your location multiple times or spend hours on skills tests and other work. While you never want to cut corners, it’s important to identify ways you can condense and streamline the process so that you’re not asking too much of the candidate.
How technology impacts candidate quality
Much of our advice around quality is easier to complete when you have the quality technology to support you. And of course any existing Hireology customer already has these tools at their disposal — the key is making sure you’re getting the most value out of them to help you build your best team. In both Hireolgy’s product section as well as our fireside chat with the San Diego Padres, we covered the following Hireology features that help you run a great hiring process to not only attract top talent but identify the best of the best, including:
- Missing information automation
- Pre-screen surveys
- Reference checks
- Background checks
- Employee referrals
Thanks again to all of our customers who joined us for Spring Customer Connect covering all things candidate quality. Stay tuned for more information on our next event! If you’re not yet a customer and you’re interested in learning more about how our platform can help you improve candidate quality, take a virtual tour of our product today.
