Working Strategically With Emerging Technology and Your Recruiter
Dear Hiring Manager:
Technology is transforming recruiting as it is everything. Even though we have not yet quite achieved the tools to automate the entire recruiting process, we do have tools to help. Over the next few years, you will see more tools to guide and advise you and reduce your need to contact a recruiter.
This evolution of recruiting will be most straightforward if you begin working with the new technology and your recruiter right away.
You probably only hire a handful of people each year, and the process is simple. When the need arises, you get in touch with your recruiter. She writes or edits the job descriptions with your input and posts the job. And then, she finds candidates, screens them, and negotiates the terms of their hire.
You will soon be able to do much of this yourself with help from a chatbot such as ChatGPT. The recruiter may guide you and offer suggestions, but consulting with her will not be necessary if you learn to use the tools.
Basing Your Hires on Data
It is common to approach each new hire like one that took place before. That means using whatever job description you used in the past with a few tweaks and looking for the same qualifications. Unfortunately, that job description is frequently inaccurate and does not reflect the person you hired last time.
Recent data suggests that around 82% of all hires are not the best or right fit for the position. Turnover rates are high, and employees are disengaged.
The leading cause is that we hire with our gut and not our heads. We don’t use data or examine our successes or failures from past recruiting experiences.
To increase the odds of a productive hire, you need to figure out the job requirements and lay out the specific qualifications of the person you want to hire. This is where AI tools can help by analyzing the data, looking for common patterns that indicate success or failure, and helping you develop more meaningful qualifications.
In my many years as a recruiter and consultant, I find this area most frequently overlooked or skimped on in the hiring process. Most hiring managers I work with are willing to spend time interviewing and often demand that candidates go through numerous interviews. Still, they are less inclined to find or use data and define the position based on current and future needs.
My guess is that you’re running on your gut when it comes to defining what you want. You tell yourself you’ll know the “best” when you see it. After all, you’ve been in your field for a while and can generally spot a loser. If you are lucky, you’ve had a recruiter at some time who could always seem to get you the perfect candidate, but you’ve never asked yourself why they could do that or how.
But times are changing, and AI is here to partner with you and your recruiter.
Here are five things you can do to find better candidates and hire faster. [I warn you that you may rethink certain positions and maybe even find out that some of your employees are a lot better than (or not so capable as) you thought.]
Tip #1: Nail down the skills and competencies of your best performers.
Spend some time thinking about your best performers. Who are the people in your department you would like to clone if you could? Try to put into words why you think they are so good. Ask yourself: What do they regularly do that is critical to your success? What is the single most important trait/behavior/skill that makes them successful? When did an employee do something that you found exceptional or notable? Work to use data and the opinions of your teammates to create a list of necessary and nice-to-have qualifications – not usually the ones you used to think were required. As Google learned a decade ago, qualifications such as degrees, GPA, schools attended, or previous employers are not good indicators of potential or performance.
Tip #2: Get to know your recruiter.
Your recruiter is becoming more of an advisor and coach than a pair of hands. Their job is more and more to help you create an accurate and compelling job description, craft good marketing messages, and guide you in approaching a potentially great candidate. They can help you use the tools available to screen candidates without needing to interview all of them.
Tip #3: Develop an assessment process.
One of the best ways to ensure that you are in sync on what kinds of people to look for is to work with the recruiter to put together a process for assessing candidates. Develop questions or other assessment processes to help you decide on the traits, skills, and qualities you need. Using AI to help filter candidates is becoming a powerful tool for improving candidate quality. These can be embedded into software and chatbots to screen out unqualified candidates without wasting your or a recruiter’s time.
Tip #4: Develop metrics
Dovetailing with this, establish some core measures of success. Work with your recruiter to decide what to measure – maybe how quickly a new employee hits the productivity level you want or how well they became a part of your team. There are all sorts of possible things you can measure, but the ones that are the most important are those that relate to the quality of the candidates you see and ultimately hire and the speed at which you get to see them.
Tip #5: Become marketing oriented.
Use the newly available tools, such as ChatGPT to help you and your recruiter write job descriptions that are engaging and accurate. Work with your recruiter to figure out what messages attract the best people.
By basing your hiring requirements and selection process on data and using the now available AI tools, you can hire better people who will be happier and more productive. And you will find that being in control of your own hiring is a great feeling and will lead to better hires.
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We Can Help
For the past twenty-five years, we have been helping major corporations, non-profits, and NGOs to redesign, improve, or transform their talent acquisition functions. We work with you as a partner to assess and improve your processes, find and remove constraints, create more engaging career sites, and choose the most useful and relevant technology. We are flexible and agile and have only one goal – to make recruiting strategic and pertinent to your organization. Let me know if we can help. Send me an email at kwheeler@futureoftalent.org.
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