How Feedback Can Improve Your Recruitment Strategy
Finding the right candidates is not easy, especially in a competitive job market. Attracting and retaining your future superstars is among the C-suite’s most significant concerns for organizational success and understandably so. Turnover is expensive and directly impacts your organization’s performance on many levels.
The direct costs of running ads and HR’s time vetting candidates add up and these numbers are at the low end of the cost spectrum. If your account for the indirect costs relating to the impact on morale, lost institutional knowledge, and stress on the rest of the team who have to pick up the slack, that can make the impact of turnover immense and difficult to measure.
Your recruitment strategy must target and attract the right candidates if you want to be successful. Hiring for cultural fit based on your core values as well as skills and experience is crucial. To help you ensure hiring and retention success, tap into your team for their insights and feedback to make sure you have radical team alignment and support. After all, your current teams are your ambassadors in the recruitment and onboarding process, and like building any team, you need your teams to gel!
Poor recruitment choices can alienate top talent and damage your organization’s reputation among future candidates, so the stakes are high. A bad hire or poor fit leads to wasted team time, energy and possibly even internal team conflict. Getting it right starts with getting your team’s feedback and buy-in, which can take an ordinary process to extraordinary success.
Feedback provides insights you need (and want)
For many hiring managers, feedback translates to valuable data and insights that allow you to fine-tune each interaction with your candidates at every stage of your hiring process. Your team can help you understand how your process can improve your chances in the competition for talent and make you an employer of choice.
Why is this critically important to get right? 83% of candidates claim that a negative recruitment experience impacts their opinion of a company, while 77% feel the initial interview is hugely impactful on their overall experience with a company. This is all about reputation management and a successful onboarding process.
Including your team in candidate evaluation is very beneficial. This will increase your team’s engagement, help build an accurate assessment of the candidate and help demonstrate to the candidate and employees the quality and care you put into the hiring process.
You’ll discover what motivates top talent
51% of employees are casually seeking new career opportunities, but many search for new roles every single day. A casual inquiry can quickly turn into a top prospect for the company. And if you are not addressing all aspects of your employee experience, those people searching may be your own. Recruitment does not stop at the hiring stage.
Without knowing what motivates and engages your employees, you can’t understand what will draw a prospect in and encourage them to take that next step.
Team feedback can give hiring managers the insights they need to understand not only what can bring a candidate to their company’s doorstep, but how to make each subsequent step a positive progression that wins the candidate over.
Company and candidate alignment becomes simple
24% of all job seekers read company reviews when considering a new job and 9 in 10 job seekers feel that a company’s reputation matters just as much as the role they are interested in when looking at a new organization.
Inviting your team to share feedback and insights on your social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn as well as recruitment and reputation sites like Indeed and Glassdoor can be a huge benefit. Even if you receive negative comments or constructive feedback, how you respond to those items can help you learn and demonstrate why you would be a great company to work for.
Like any sales process, you need to present an accurate and compelling picture to your candidates to attract the ones that are radially aligned with who you are, what you stand for, and what you do. Paying attention to your employer brand and the employee experience can result in candidates who apply to be 50% more qualified, reduce time to hire by half and as a bonus reduce turnover by 28%. Seeking social feedback can help you discover whether your brand alignment is there and what the overall perception of your brand is to both external and internal audiences.
Feedback is a must
It’s no secret that consistently improving recruitment and onboarding strategies as well as paying attention to the entire employee experience is a necessary aspect of attracting and retaining top talent.
According to PwC, 93% of C-suite executives recognize their organizations need to make changes to their recruitment strategies to attract the right talent. However, only 32% of companies have taken steps to implement change. By incorporating your team’s feedback in the hiring process and in your employer brand marketing, you can take a step in the right direction.
Author Bio – Tom Short
Over the course of 25 years, Tom has used his passion for entrepreneurship and marketing to launch numerous, highly successful companies, including Kudos®, a peer to peer social recognition platform that promotes and enhances corporate culture, motivates individuals and creates great employee experiences. You can keep up and connect with Tom on LinkedIn.
