Like getting tips on enhancing your personal resume, recommendations for improving your company’s recruiting function can be wide-ranging. HR leaders rightfully focus on more bang for your budget: “What is our greatest need at this moment and what is the most efficient way to address it?”.  While running a consulting practice focused specifically on recruitment strategy, I have made plenty of recommendations on enhancements to make companies more successful at finding and hiring great employees.  I feel comfortable sharing my number one suggestion on what companies can do today to hire better employees faster and at reduced cost. You might be surprised at my clear number one.

First let us explore the short list.

• Process – Most companies can clearly tell you what their recruiting process is but don’t follow it. Aligning reality to vision can improve time-to-fill and quality-of-hire.
• Brand – Iconic brands/companies gain access to superior talent, but 99% of companies do not carry that luxury. The others must succinctly describe who they are and what they stand for with every job posting. Bypassing this step results in missing a group of candidate’s companies typically would want to hire.
• Technology – Upgrading technology is often the typical go to and easy choice when seeking improvements.  It’s the “reflex” option:  “We need to get better so let’s upgrade [input shiny new object here]”.  The trap is innovative technologies can highlight flaws rather than eliminate them, be expensive, and very complex to implement.
• Talent – Hiring more expensive (and therefore hopefully more talented) recruiters can make a big difference.  Unfortunately, even the best recruiters are at the mercy of all the items listed above. Without the tools to find and hire the best candidates, recruiters can be handcuffed no matter how talented they are.

HR leaders would be excited if all the above were on point in their companies. Yet there is something bigger, something if perfectly executed would improve recruiting more than all the above. AND it is what I regularly see overlooked when upgrading recruiting functions. Simply put, many hiring managers are terrible interviewers.

Bold statement but let me defend it! Do you know hiring managers who…

• consider themselves extraordinary talent scouts because they have that “gut feeling” when they are talking to the right person?
• will throw their whole assessment process out the window when a colleague/former co-worker provides an assessment of someone they worked with years ago?
• in their day jobs use precision, data, and consistency to make the best decisions, yet spend 30 minutes (or less) in an interview without taking notes and base their decision on fuzzy or non-existent criteria?

In today’s environment, having hiring managers screen out the best candidates is not sustainable for a successful business. It is a big task to fix but here are four ideas for improvement:

• Create interview guides which help interviewers focus on the right questions to ask and the right cultural attributes to screen.
• Convince leaders of the importance of interview assessments. Conduct never-ending trainings, workshops, lunch & learns, etc. to improve assessment abilities of managers.
• Train recruiters to conduct “60- second training” when they interact with hiring managers, utilizing every minute they have with managers on improving skills.
• Identify and promote success stories to show all managers what “right” looks like.
• I’m convinced that very few companies get interviewing right. Focusing on this key area of the recruitment process can make all the difference in a company’s ability to identify the most qualified hires needed for long-term success.

Tell me what you think. Do you have your clear number one recruiting improvement to implement at your company?

Eddie Stewart has over 20 years of recruiting experience, working in both large and small corporate environments. He currently owns and operates ES Talent Solutions, a consulting firm focused on strategic recruiting consulting.

Need help identifying what needs to be fixed or want an outside view of the health of your recruiting function? Contact Eddie (estewart@ESTalentSolutions.com) at ESTS to learn more about corporate recruiting assessments and how they may improve your organization.