It is important to leverage data in your talent selection process. Isolate each step in your recruitment process and measure the effectiveness of each stage with data. You will begin to see the vulnerabilities in your processes and areas for improvement.
1. Turnover Risk Mitigation
Many retailers are focused on the front-end of assessment processes, more specifically candidate interviews. There is a sense of relief as if the hardest step of the recruitment process is over but this is not the case.
Turnover risk mitigation is the number of candidates screened out post-interview as a result of poor peer feedback (reference scores). Gauge the quality of your late stage screening tools. How effective are your reference checks and does it impact your hiring decisions?
Use that data as a benchmark for quality to filter out bad pre-hires. Quantify the number of bad pre-hires you are not making based on your assessment tools. This will help you determine the ROI of your assessments in driving quality hires. At Mindfield, we have found that on average 7-10% of applicants don’t get through to the next stage based on information provided from their reference.
By uncovering these pre-hire red flags, you are ultimately mitigating the risk of making a bad hire for your company.
2. New Talent Impact
New talent impact provides early recognition of a new hire’s fit and can be used as an identifier for potential issues. It also helps to control the employment experience and reveals the effectiveness of your HR processes. The new hire’s predicted success can be measured by:
- Hiring manager’s rehire certainty – After 30 days, survey the hiring manager to gauge their level of desire to rehire the candidate
- Team member’s cultural fit – Are they fitting in well with the company culture and other employees?
- New hire engagement scores
To minimize short-term turnover, use these tools to help reduce the time in finding out if a new hire is a good fit or not. Keep your fingers on the pulse and start collecting data on a smaller more frequent scale.
3. New Hire Engagement
New hire engagement can help round out a new hire’s performance based on their fit, focus, and feelings. This metric should be gauged at regular intervals during an employee’s first few months on the job (i.e. 30, 60, and 90 days after hire).
Surveying your new hires can offer valuable first impression insights into your company’s:
- Onboarding process
- Training resources
- Overall culture
New hire engagement helps identify the candidate’s perspective on the hiring processes. By collecting good empirical data, it can help justify investing more time and resources to improve your hiring process.
4. Manager Selection Strength
Create a rating on how your managers select talent. Compare the overall pre-employment ratings of hired candidates versus candidates who were screened out during the hiring process.
There are regional market differences, but develop a benchmark of hiring manager performance at making hiring decisions. Recognize which managers are doing a great job at onboarding, engaging, and selecting great talent. Also identify which hiring managers are falling short.
Create consistent benchmarks based on data so hiring managers are held accountable. This helps to add competitive play for underperforming areas. It also allows for micro-targeting specific managers that need more training on learning how to hire more effectively. This allows you to break down the problem for each region/district instead of blanketing it as an overall company issue. It also provides clarity and determines reasons for discrepancies for turnover.
5. Passive Pipeline Growth
Passive pipeline growth is a measurement of how many passive candidates you’re adding to your candidate pipeline via non-job specific recruiting methods. If your pipeline is stocked, this ultimately decreases your time to hire and improves the overall quality of your workforce.
This talent selection metric is important because it decreases feelings of anxiety of not having sufficient talent, and it allows you to be more selective in your hiring process.
Learn the source of where your passive candidates are coming from. Determine where these individuals are and engage them to further build out your talent network.
We believe that ‘great people know great people’. When conducting your later stage assessments for your top quality pre-hires, target their references to join your pipeline. About one third of the workforce is considering looking for a new job. The ability to convert that passive reference to understand what’s interesting about your company and culture will help generate a passive pipeline.
Recommendations
- Start small – focus on little areas where you can start improving your talent selection metrics. For those that are new to this, we suggest sending a survey after a reasonable time your new hire was made and quantify how that new hire is working out. Ask basic questions and keep a pulse on candidate engagement and experience. As you dig into this you’ll understand by looking at specific data points to answer specific questions will lead to quick short-term results.We understand that you may not necessarily be in a position in your organization to make big changes to your recruitment process. But by starting small, you can quickly see that you can add tremendous value to improving the quality of your hiring process. You want to be able to say that your hires today are meaningfully better than your hires yesterday.
- Create a process – Data can be overwhelming. Create a simple process to collect and evaluate the data. Make sure you are being strategic in measuring key things that will provide you with important information to help you drive results.
Use talent analytics, so you can mitigate risk, and drive results.
To learn more about how Mindfield can use data to help improve the quality of your hourly workforce, click here.