Back to all articles Recruitment is expensive, time consuming and resource hungry, so minimising unnecessary recruitment hassle and expense through employee attrition can pay big dividends – allowing you to focus your activities on areas of emerging demand and business development.
You might consider the costs and broader impacts of re-recruiting to backfill existing as inevitable and just a cost of doing business, but that cost might be higher than you think. The impact of on-boarding new, inexperienced people can be significant – not just within the immediate team, but also more broadly across your organisation, due to the domino-effect of slower processes and poorer quality output.
In an ideal world, your recruitment process should be focussed on acquiring new skills to fulfil genuinely new roles in a developing business. Wouldn’t it be great if the only time you needed to back-fill an existing role was when the previous incumbent was going on to bigger and better things within your own organisation?! Not an easy thing to achieve, granted.
Getting recruitment right
So, recruiting the right person for the right role reduces employee attrition, which in turn reduces costs, improves productivity and allows your business to develop more quickly and more effectively.
It all sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? The trick, of course, is recognising that recruitment isn’t just as east as posting an advert, reading some CVs and doing a couple of interviews.
Let’s take a quick look at the key steps which will allow you to choose the right people for the right role within your organisation. And that means that long before you start the search process, you need to understand what it is that you actually need.
Firstly, make sure you have a detailed job description that identifies the tasks that need to be performed and the skills required to do these. Then consider which of these are the most critical, which of these are pre-requisites for the candidate, and which can be developed as part of the on-boarding process. That will allow you to define a set of criteria, from which you can assess candidates.
Next, comes the matter of culture. The ability to carry out a role is only part of what makes a candidate suitable. What’s even more important is whether the candidate will be a good fit for your organisation’s culture and philosophy:
These questions are often difficult to answer and this is where the more subtle and sophisticated elements of recruitment really come to the fore – and where specialist consultants such as Mayseven can add most value.
Using psychometric testing and behavioural analysis can provide an accurate and objective assessment of a candidate’s suitability for a role and their likely fit for your organisation. Of course, this only works if the right competency questions are asked and the right interpretations are derived. For example, McQuaig are a leading provider of psychometric testing capability, and here at Mayseven, we’ve been awarded McQuaig Accredited Interpreter status which allows us to harness this insight to help our clients reduce attrition. If you want to learn more about psychometric testing, take a look at our previous article on the subject here.
Of course the traditional elements of the recruitment process are still important. CVs need to be assessed, group recruitment sessions can provide insight, and interviews will help to confirm that all the other inputs have provided an accurate picture of the candidate. As technology continues to improve, remote assessments and interviews are becoming more popular, and can provide a more efficient way to manage these elements of the process.
Tools such as Mayseven’s you&me platform can also be incredibly beneficial in hiring right the first time, helping you to build a target profile from every aspect of a role’s requirements, and assess candidates against this profile. Using modern recruitment technology like this will ensure that your shortlist for interviews will only include those that are likely to make the grade – from all perspectives, not just skills or experience alone. Platforms like this also help you to manage the logistical elements of grading candidates, facilitating interviews and managing the offer process.
Bring all of these elements together successfully and you’ll see significant reductions in unnecessary employee attrition – and your business will benefit from the recruitment of the most skilled and suitable candidates for your key roles.