Companies and hiring managers globally are experiencing similar issues: they’re struggling to fill key roles and subsequently failing to meet critical project deadlines. Many of our clients come to us because their hiring processes are falling short and they’re struggling to hire top talent. If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that covers the five common hiring mistakes that hinder the hiring process.
The impact of poor hiring processes
Despite ongoing economic uncertainty, most executives in Europe are planning to accelerate their digital programmes and change transformation projects. With business pressure increasing, Chief Technical Officers (CTOs) are looking to hire the highest rated candidates – but they’re struggling.
While there are numerous reasons – including sifting through the same talent pool as competitors, global tech giants and startups – the truth is: getting the highest rated candidates into your talent pipeline is hard! However, if your hiring processes are causing unnecessary blockages, you’ll never see them.
To clarify, there is no shortage of skilled professionals, regardless of how large or specialised your team needs to be. However, when seeking top talent, hiring managers are facing challenges including:
- Candidate attrition
- Underwhelming applicants
- High turnover
If this sounds something you’re experiencing, it’s time to identify the underlying cause.
We’ve been supporting companies on their change transformation journeys for many years now – and it’s safe to say, we’ve seen it all! Common traps companies fall into while trying to recruit new talent during the hiring process include failing to give partners the information and attention they need to source high quality candidates, and simply not dedicating enough time to train their internal team of interviewers. This results in a negative experience for those in the talent pipeline – as such, very few make it to the final stages of the interview process.
The knock-on effect from this is that critical transformation projects are derailed and go over deadlines and budgets. What’s more, due to the additional impact of business uncertainty, resources are put under further strain, which means, fixing issues has never been more important.
Closing your talent gap is not as monumental a challenge as it may seem. There are five common mistakes that, when properly addressed, could help dramatically improve and accelerate your hiring process. To say ahead, you need to act on them now.
5 critical gaps in the candidate journey
How do you usually hire for a role? Do you spend a lot of time mapping out the specific job title you’re looking for? Do you negotiate with the wider business to decide on an appropriate renumeration and benefits package? What do you do in between? Do you think about what happens once your job post goes live?
That’s an issue.
The candidate journey through your hiring process is as crucial as the customer journey through your product. The product itself may be brilliant – but it will fail without a thoughtful, well-designed and user-focused customer experience and user journey. The same is true for your staffing projects. Engaging candidates correctly and consistently from their very first interaction with your company – and then throughout the hiring process – significantly improves your stickiness.
1. Selling the package instead of the vision
The truth is that most people move jobs for emotional reasons. They want career development they aren’t seeing in their current role, or they want to work for a company that shares their values. Very few people care about money and benefits the most.
However, this is still how a lot of businesses sell their job roles – if they sell at all. In tech roles in particular, neglecting to share the company vision is a huge mistake. Here’s why:
The highest rated developers, architects and project managers are in incredibly high demand. They can do their job anywhere and have their pick of countless companies looking for their exact skillset. Why should they do it for you? A couple of extra days’ holiday and a pool table no longer cuts it for top tech talent looking to switch companies.
2. Using unqualified interviewers
For top talent, poor interviewers will stop progression in its tracks before it has even truly begun. Ultimately, poor interviewers forget that their job is to find a right fit for their company, and not to find fault with candidates and potential hires. Our data shows that asking pointless questions, or worse, slipping into Simon Cowell-style ‘bully mode’ puts candidates off a company, causing them to drop out of the process.
While there is no single right way to run interviews, there are lots of wrong ways. A hiring team with no skills in interviewing is one of them. If they don’t know how to conduct an interview properly, neglecting the candidate experience, you can wave goodbye to your hiring plan!
3. Failing to prepare for interviews
Be honest, how much time do you spend preparing for interviews? Do you have a clear idea of what questions are important to ask? Do you know what a good answer to those questions are? Do you know how to engage a candidate to get the best answers from them?
Neglecting to spend time reading a candidate’s profile and CV – and tailoring the interview around them – is a mistake. If you scan it on the way to the meeting and wing the rest, you are missing the opportunity to acquire top talent. Sending interviewers into an interview without a solid, strategic approach to the process is the best way to disengage a candidate. It wastes your time, but it also wastes theirs.
4. Not engaging well with talent partners
Staffing solutions companies often come under scrutiny – sometimes with good reason, sometimes not! If you’re using a staffing agency to find candidates, you need to give them the tools to do the job well. Engaging them properly and communicating with them regularly is vital. Simply giving them a one-page overview of the job description and leaving them to it, won’t cut it.
People are often sceptical of external staffing solutions providers, and it’s not hard to understand why. But if that’s the case, don’t work with them. A truly valuable talent partner will be able to understand your company’s needs, and work autonomously to deliver excellent results… But it needs to be a two-way street. By managing them poorly, you’re setting them (and yourself) up to fail.
5. Delaying feedback
There are no candidates out there who have felt engaged and excited about a position after a company has taken weeks to get back to them with a response. Demand is high and supply is low – in other words, the market is busy – treating talent mean will simply not keep them keen.
There’s no good reason for stalling or being overcautious about giving candidates feedback. Making candidates wait is more reason for them to move onto your competitors. It’s not a risk you can afford to take.
How to find the top 2% of talent during the hiring process
Knowing what’s wrong isn’t the same as knowing how to fix it. The right approach will depend on your business – and this begins with you thinking critically about how good your hiring processes really are. Truthfully? You might not like the answers.
You need to ask yourself if you’re taking hiring seriously enough. Because if you aren’t, your business will suffer. You wouldn’t take a half-based approach to developing software, or building a product roadmap, and you shouldn’t for creating a hiring plan, either.
Thankfully, there’s some low-hanging fruit you can implement now to smooth out the candidate experience – and get high-value talent onboarded faster and more successfully.
Sell the vision
Treat candidates like they’re your clients and sell! The majority of people looking to switch jobs want to know where they’re going, and the part they can play in getting there. In other words – your company vision is your greatest asset!
Tech talent in particular enjoy engaging with senior team members to understand the wider scope, as well as the detail of the work. So let them do that before you start testing their capability. And, if the reason you’re hiring them is to drive towards future goals, ask questions about how they’d tackle them. Get rid of irrelevant scenario-based questions about things they’ve done in the past. This is about the future – theirs and yours!
Train interviewers
Your current employees conducting interviews are likely specialists in their niche – tech specialists, perhaps. But, if you’re putting your potential next hires in front of them, they need to become proficient in both.
Listen to how well your team performs in interviews and challenge them on their technique. Make sure they’re selling the business and not simply putting candidates off. Consider setting up exit polls to get feedback on candidates on how they found the process (whether you liked them or not). Take the same data-driven approach to iterate your hiring process as you would to any other form of user testing.
Prepare thoroughly
No more skimming CVs over a cuppa on the way to an interview – build a proper framework! And make sure you’re asking questions you really want to know the answers to – not just the ones you always ask, just because.
Most importantly, make sure you’re getting the delicate balance right between testing competency and encouraging engagement with the role. Spend too long on one instead of the other, and you’ll end up with a candidate who is perfectly capable of doing the job – and well – they just don’t want it.
Get in sync with talent partners
Talent partners are often a candidate’s first point of contact with your business, and first impressions count. So, make sure your partners are set up to make a good one.
That starts with you.
Share as much information and context on the role as you can from the outset. Then, keep sharing. This is not a ‘one and done’ relationship. Work closely with them, share feedback, give clear guidelines on what good and bad looks like – and communicate with them clearly and often. If you’re running daily scrums with other teams, run them with your talent team too!
Deliver transformation faster than ever
The hiring process works better with open lines of communication and transparent processes, underpinned by rapid and valuable feedback. After all, transformation moves fast – and you should too.
Venquis specialise in change transformation by deeply understanding client needs, to deliver solutions that improve productivity, gets projects delivered faster and more successfully, driving revenue for some of the largest technology companies in Europe. Why not join us?
Want to know more about staffing your projects,
and getting them delivered faster than ever? Start hiring.