Just staffing, not hiring
In my long career in the corporate world, one thing, I had seen time and again that if that we were always better of having a position vacant than staffing it with a mismatch profile. One wrong choice meant, some others taking up his/her load, negative vibes creeping up,some of the best performers turning into mediocre etc.. Also, since most of such people landed up being taken out of the assignments soon, if not out of the organization, we always had to start fresh. Despite that, the defect ratio were pretty high, even in the best of the organization. More often than not, the campus hiring team always knew, which was a good batch and which wasn't a good batch, but then, as with the other people in the organizations, they were trying and meet their numbers.
How to drive the right behaviour
In order to avoid such mishaps, it becomes imperative for organisations to have corrective measures in place to deal with such undesirable situations. So how can an organisation prevent recruiting such bad hires? A few things, which I have seen working:
A) One has to ensure that there are the right measurement systems in place so that the effectiveness of the hiring team and channel is not based purely on the fulfillment ratio, but also on other metrics like, performance issues and attrition percent in the first six months.
B) Attracting the right candidates by proper recruitment branding and choosing the right recruitment channels helps prevent bad hires from coming on board. A thorough reference check of the candidate does play an important part in the hiring process. The ideal scenario to eliminate bad hires is to have a robust, scalable and seamless recruitment system in place.The system has to be a mix of processes of skill evaluation, psychometric evaluation and background/reference checks. Generally, the HR or consultants carry out the reference check with the two referees whose names are provided by the candidates themselves, this is not the right approach, simply because the candidate, more often than not, has already taken these two people in confidence before providing their names. Hence, it is important to do independent checks
C) Each role in the organisation should have a competency matrix associated with it. Competency mapping can be done with the help of behavioural event-based interviews and competency questionnaires. More and more open ended questions should be put forth to candidates so that it becomes a lot easier for recruiters to gauge his/her strengths and weaknesses.
D) If one would see on the surface, almost all good companies are very rigorous about evaluating candidates, however, one a deeper look, the robustly designed hiring processes are poorly executed. Hence, HR education and familiarity with some of the cost elements, like annual cost of bad hires etc. is as important as their linkages to the performance bonuses.
In my long career in the corporate world, one thing, I had seen time and again that if that we were always better of having a position vacant than staffing it with a mismatch profile. One wrong choice meant, some others taking up his/her load, negative vibes creeping up,some of the best performers turning into mediocre etc.. Also, since most of such people landed up being taken out of the assignments soon, if not out of the organization, we always had to start fresh. Despite that, the defect ratio were pretty high, even in the best of the organization. More often than not, the campus hiring team always knew, which was a good batch and which wasn't a good batch, but then, as with the other people in the organizations, they were trying and meet their numbers.
How to drive the right behaviour
In order to avoid such mishaps, it becomes imperative for organisations to have corrective measures in place to deal with such undesirable situations. So how can an organisation prevent recruiting such bad hires? A few things, which I have seen working:
A) One has to ensure that there are the right measurement systems in place so that the effectiveness of the hiring team and channel is not based purely on the fulfillment ratio, but also on other metrics like, performance issues and attrition percent in the first six months.
B) Attracting the right candidates by proper recruitment branding and choosing the right recruitment channels helps prevent bad hires from coming on board. A thorough reference check of the candidate does play an important part in the hiring process. The ideal scenario to eliminate bad hires is to have a robust, scalable and seamless recruitment system in place.The system has to be a mix of processes of skill evaluation, psychometric evaluation and background/reference checks. Generally, the HR or consultants carry out the reference check with the two referees whose names are provided by the candidates themselves, this is not the right approach, simply because the candidate, more often than not, has already taken these two people in confidence before providing their names. Hence, it is important to do independent checks
C) Each role in the organisation should have a competency matrix associated with it. Competency mapping can be done with the help of behavioural event-based interviews and competency questionnaires. More and more open ended questions should be put forth to candidates so that it becomes a lot easier for recruiters to gauge his/her strengths and weaknesses.
D) If one would see on the surface, almost all good companies are very rigorous about evaluating candidates, however, one a deeper look, the robustly designed hiring processes are poorly executed. Hence, HR education and familiarity with some of the cost elements, like annual cost of bad hires etc. is as important as their linkages to the performance bonuses.
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