1/2: How to Ensure You Have All-Star Employees From Day One - Update Your Hiring Process.

However, research has shown that many companies are not only struggling to improve time-to-productivity, typically 8 months (HBR), but are in fact losing new hires shortly after they start, with 20% of employees leaving within the first 45 days (SHRM). 

Therefore it is clear that there are improvements needed in the hiring process and when an employee begins to help new hires be more productive and engaged from the get-go, and for companies to create a job and working environment in which a person wants to stay. 

This is a two-part blog giving you top tips on hiring the right people for your business and ways to make sure they are happy, healthy and productive from their first day onwards. Today we look at improvements to the hiring process.

Top 7 reasons for slow time-to-productivity or quick turnover.

1. Poor hiring decisions. 80% of all employee turnover is due to poor hiring practices. (HBR)
2. Lack of clarity on the role. Nearly 50% of employees across all sectors currently lack role clarity in the workplace. (Effectory)
3. A poor onboarding process. Poor onboarding makes new hires 8x more likely to feel disengaged within their organisation. (Glint)
4. Bad management. 77% of employees with bad managers say they hope to leave their job soon. (Predictive Index)
5. A toxic company culture. 32% of new hires state company culture as the reason for leaving a job within 90 days. (JobVite)
6. Lack of professional development opportunities. 93% of employees stated that they would stay in a role longer if the company invested in their career development. (Forbes)
7. Absence of recognition & benefits. 37% of employees stated that recognition is the most important form of employer support. (Smarp) While 67% of employees working in companies that provide wellness schemes are more engaged and happy. (Sprout Social)

How to improve your hiring process to increase employee productivity from day one and reduce turnover. 

Create candidate personas 

A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidates or hires, based on a variety of sources, in order to make confident predictions about what qualities it takes to thrive within your company. The information you collect helps you to find commonalities such as demographics, skills set and experience. This will also help you to target specific audiences and candidates sources, resulting in better quality candidates and hires. The 3 areas to carry out research when creating candidate profiles are as follows: 

1. Business leaders and department heads 
2. High performing employees 
3. HR analytics 
   

Revise your job descriptions & stick to a template

To increase the number of engaged and qualified candidates, consider their first step in applying for a role within your organisation, the job description. You want candidates to be fully aware of the job they will be doing but also the company they will be working for. The benefit of this is that the applicant will be more educated on the role they are applying for and more engaged with the company itself.

Creating a streamlined job description template is a great way to ensure all the standard areas are covered in job descriptions but also creates a format that all departments should follow to ensure you are consistently attracting the best quality candidates. This is also the prime opportunity to establish transparency by outlining your salary and hiring process, leading to a better candidate experience from the start. This is what we would suggest as standard on all job descriptions: 

• Company values
• Employee Value Proposition (EVP)
• Diversity & Inclusion mission statement
• General benefits
• Day-to-day job role & responsibilities
• What is needed to be successful - consider using this sentence instead of ‘requirements’ and only include necessary requirements
• Salary
• Hiring process timeline

Utilise psychometric testing in the hiring process

Irrespective of the remote working shift, the importance and rise of soft skills had become vital for businesses to make successful hires as more and more businesses move towards a people-oriented and collaborative-working approach. 

Soft skills are the inherent characteristics or skills that make up an individuals personality traits. Such traits or skills include: communication, collaboration, sociability, emotional intelligence and cognitive thinking. For an employee to interact well and be productive from day one, it is important to first understand what you need, and how they will add to the team and the company overall. That is where psychometric testing comes in. 

Psychometric testing is a great tool that can be used to get a clearer picture of a candidate’s core personality traits and driving forces relative to your company values and the responsibilities of the role. Prior to hiring, carry out psychometric testing with your teams as this will help you to identify successful personality traits in your team, where there are gaps and what you should add to enhance your teams performance. It will also help you to create really strong hiring profiles.

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Consider the hiring process from the candidates perspective 

It’s no secret that candidate experience is one of the biggest issues in the hiring process. Here are just a few of the statistics that highlight the bearing it is having on talent attraction: 

• More than half of job seekers say employers never keep them informed about their application status (Talentboard)
• 60% of job seekers have quit an application in the middle due to its length or complexity (SHRM)
• Negative candidate experience will cause 69% of candidates to never work with your company again (Talentboard)
  

However in good news, a positive candidate experience makes candidates 38 percent more likely to accept a job offer (IBM). Consider an employee starting a position after a poor candidate experience throughout the hiring process, they begin life in your organisation with a negative perception which can and does lead to a lack of productivity and quick turnover.

Communication and efficiency are the two most important areas when creating a positive candidate experience. Ensure that you are focusing on the following when developing a hiring process with candidates in mind: 

• An easy-to-fill, straightforward application form
• Automated communication 
• Regular updates 
• Added-value content to give candidates more information on your company 
• Interview feedback 
• Personalised/always-on communication avenues i.e. chatbots 
• An efficient and time-conscious recruitment process 
  

Focus on culture & employee experience throughout hiring  

With a workforce shift to millennials and Gen Z, company culture and employee experience have become significantly more important to not only establish and maintain, but to promote as part of your hiring strategy. This is because nowadays people don’t want to just work for a salary, they want to add purpose, grow personally and professionally, and align their values to the company they are with.

Highlighting your company culture from the beginning of the process can have a big impact on top quality candidates choosing you over a competitor, resulting in hires that are engaged with your culture before even beginning to work for you. Create employer branding videos and content that demonstrates why your company culture is different and why people work for you over others. 

At application and interview stage, focus on employee experience and the value you put on your employees. The top areas to consider are: L&D, flexibility, wellness, career development and feedback. Discussing these areas demonstrates your vested interested in your employees happiness and future, resulting in candidates having an insight and a positive outlook of the future with your company.

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