Hire for Retention: 3 Steps for Making Better Hires
Your new hire position description is ready. You’ve posted it far and wide, and within just a few days, you have hundreds of applications that have passed through your applicant tracking system and a mound of resumes from which to begin your sifting. You begin to worry that by the time you discover the best, most qualified fit, your job seeker may have already moved on. By the looks of it, recruitment and employee retention won’t get easier anytime soon, but following these three strategic steps will help you hire for retention better and faster than ever before.
Step 1: Target Your Outreach to Build Pipeline
We all know that if you want to come out ahead of your competition, you need to hire the best talent in the market to help you get there. Your problem: 52 percent of people who apply to a job are underqualified, while nearly 50 percent of companies report few or no qualified applicants for the positions they are trying to fill.
That means in addition to submitted applications, consider outbound efforts to strategically source the kind of talent you want to retain long term. To find those whose skills and background experiences align with your open role, here are a few options:
- Diversify your sourcing channels. Candidates may be more receptive to outreach messages on less conventional websites. Profiles on such sites can yield unique information that allows you to make outreach more personalized.
- Find individuals on LinkedIn, target them with a personalized “InMail,” and then follow up with an email to their work email or download one of those email finder extensions!), to share the opportunity at your company.
- Tap into your current employees to source their networks and consider an employee referral program.
- Like any good sales pitch, know your audience and customize your messages. As an example, mention offering a flexible work environment if you can (since that is coveted right now), and always give enough information to pique their interest, focus on what might be most important to them in a role, and explain why you’ve reached out to them.
Step 2: Recruit, Screen and Hire to Retain
Once you have a strong pool of technically qualified candidates, you’ll want to assess and hire for culture fit. Following (or not following) this tip spells the difference between making the right (or wrong) choice.
Culture fit does not necessarily mean hiring who you or the team likes, but rather being open to hiring people unlike you or any others in your organization. Resumes, LinkedIn, and educational backgrounds only tell some of the story. Besides being self-reported, they are limited to only showing past experiences—whereas leveraging psychometrics more clearly reveals a person’s fuller potential when it comes to situational behavior, actions, opportunities for improvement, communication styles, and values—now and in the future.
For each role, region/geography, and department within the same company, the needs will be different and there is no one size fits all approach. Each individual you add or remove from the team plays a part in your culture’s evolution. It’s imperative to hire individuals who share or have demonstrated the values you have identified as paramount, believe in your vision, and are excited about the work your team is doing.
To do that, you’ll need to form a current vs. target profile of the team’s culture and then hire in a way that allows you to achieve your target and the best balance of the behaviors, motivators, and work styles for the team in which the role resides—that’s called hiring for retention and fit.
Hire for Fit: Use AI-powered recruitment technology also known as Culture-as-a-Service to take the guesswork out of candidate fit and predictive success. With CaaS, you unlock insights about candidates using a pre-hiring assessment and map that to the team culture and ideal profile for the open role—ensuring fit and assessing predictive success.
The profiles are based on a 12-minute psychometric assessment that unlocks critical information about a person’s behaviors, motivators and values, and work energizers. Once you have this information for your team and ask your candidates to take the assessment, you now have the capability to produce an ideal candidate profile, assess future success based on benchmarks, look at similarities and complements between your candidates and current team, and then identify the candidate who will make the most significant positive impact.
A candidate’s psychometric profile can give you that multidimensional snapshot of a person, rather than a bulleted list of facts. It includes comprehensive data on critical behaviors, motivators, and work energizers, as well as sought-after skills like communication, creativity, and adaptability. When you assess this kind of data alongside cognitive abilities, you’ll discover fuller representations of your candidates, be able to remove unconscious biases, and engage in a more inclusive approach to evaluating candidates.
Step 3: Involve Team Members to Hire for Retention
Involve the employees who will collaborate most with your new hire both within and across functions. You’ll be gathering a pool of feedback that can validate your own and the hiring manager’s feedback—further ensuring that you’re hiring for retention and fit. Plus, involving your current employees in meeting potential new hires helps increase transparency, keeps communication open, and provides employees with an opportunity to have an impact on decisions that affect their jobs—all helpful for their own engagement.
The Result: Better Hires
With psychometric-based recruiting technology (part of what is known as Culture-as-a-Service), you can leverage culture analytics about your teams to deliver talent more efficiently while you:
- Eliminate subjectivity and streamline up to 80% of traditional recruiting processes.
- Reduce up to 20% of turnover costs caused by mis-aligned hires using predictive success factors.
- Improve overall team and organizational performance through better, faster hiring.
We all know that great talent isn’t available for long. By creatively expanding your pipeline, using psychometrics, and involving your team, you can accelerate your time-to-hire and be more confident that your selected candidate is here to stay.