Reducing position vacancies while increasing employee engagement

There is a common hiring misstep for many companies, and that is that their process for hiring new employees takes too long.  The role is often vacant for too long and then the new hire process also takes too long.  I first noticed this trend during the last recession.  At that point, the market went from being candidate driven to client driven and I also noticed for the first time that hiring managers were becoming paralyzed with fear about making a bad hire.  During those tough economic times, companies were cutting budgets, reducing headcount and more work was being done by fewer employees, so it became even more important that all new employees were meeting expectations.  Nobody wanted to smear their reputation with a bad hire during a time of job insecurity.  The result was that there were many hiring managers who began pulling multiple colleagues and company stakeholders into the interview process so that blame could be shared for any bad hire.   

These are the four main problems with this business practice.

1.  It is unproductive for a company.  Anytime someone is pulled out of their job to meet and/or interview someone, they drop everything that they are doing.  Studies have suggested that for even a 60-minute interview, it will take the average employee 90 minutes before they get back to what they were working on before they were disrupted. 

2.  According to Brendan Browne, LinkedIn's Vice President of Talent Acquisition, a company will spend 20 hours of company time interviewing a candidate.  A lengthier hiring process is not appealing to strong candidates.  A passive candidate who is not even looking for a new job, is likely to lose interest in a company that is slow moving and/or wasting their precious time.  It also leaves the candidate with the feeling that the company is unsure of themselves which is not an inspiring quality for a candidate who is looking for a progressive company. 

 But is it not good for a candidate to meet many stakeholders to help them with this important decision?  NO. Candidates do not need or want to meet with 10 or 12 people.  They want to meet the hiring manager and someone with vision/strategy, but they want to do the rest of the research on their own.  Chances are, a panel of guarded, company selected interviewers are not likely to add any value to the candidate.   Any candidate who has been on an interview and has had to come back three, four or five times and meet more people finds it exhausting and they usually only make that mistake once in their career. They will likely pull out of the process if it happens to them a second time.  It is even more painful for the candidate when they go through this entire process, only to receive an unappealing job offer from the company.

3. Candidates are continuing to complain about work life balance.  It is the top reason that candidates call me about wanting to leave their current organization.  We live in a time of very lean organizational models and when there are open vacancies for too long and when the hiring process drags, there is even more stress placed on people who are sometimes already filling 2 different positions for a company.  The more time a role is vacant and the more interviews that someone is forced to participate in, means that that person will now likely have to work extra hours to regain time that they lost during their day.  For anyone, let alone people who work for companies with high turnover, this is the exact opposite of a company perk.

4. It is no longer a client driven job market. The best candidates now control the market. If your company doesn’t understand this, they are probably already losing the race for talent.

A.  Empower your hiring managers and let them know that they are trusted for hiring talent. 

B.  Keep a tight process and guideline schedule for interviews across all company departments.

C.  Limit the number of stakeholders involved in the interview process.

D.  If a job is vacant for too long and your H.R. team can’t commit the necessary time needed to fill it, use a search firm to fill it.  The added expense is likely to be offset by the increase in overall productivity and will also drive employee engagement. 

Farewell,

Mike