Archive for the ‘recruiting blogs’ category

Bad Hires Will Cost Your Company

May 16th, 2013

avoid bad hiring practicesA lot of work can go into finding and hiring the best people for your organization, as any beleaguered human resources professional can attest. However, hard work is required in all cases – there are no shortcuts to making great hires. No successful company is going to rely on blind luck and wishful thinking when it comes to adding new employees to their roster. In fact, bad hires will cost you plenty, according to a recent report in Quartz.

Approximately 60 percent of employers throughout the world have indicated that they made a bad hire last year, notes a recently released CareeerBuilder survey of 6,000-plus hiring managers and human resources personnel.

The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive. It shows that a large proportion of companies reporting that they hired employees who wound up performing poorly or were otherwise a bad fit are located in Russia (88 percent), Brazil (87 percent) and China (87 percent).

The percentage in the United States is about 66 percent, the same amount as in Italy. Bad hiring numbers are a little better in the UK, where 62 percent of managers reported they wound up with problematic employees, followed by 59 percent in Japan, 58 percent in Germany and just 53 percent in France. The report did not indicate how many of these bad hires had already been fired.

One reason for the large percentage of bad hires in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) was because companies in these highly competitive, emerging markets are scrambling to hire from a smaller pool of qualified candidates.

HR professionals cited a rush to fill the job as being the main reason for making hiring mistakes. The second biggest reason was what the survey called “insufficient talent intelligence.”

The negative results of these bad hires include a reduction in employee morale, poor relations with clients, dwindling sales and increased costs to hire new workers. Most companies pointed to losses in productivity because of their poor hiring choices.

Some 29 percent of human resources managers in India indicated that their bad hires wound up costing them at least $37,150, while their counterparts in China said their loss was $8,734. About 25 percent of American managers reported that the cost of a bad hire is more than $50,000.

Given the fact that bad hires will typically lead to your company losing a lot of time, money and effort, it’s prudent to make sure your HR department exercises due diligence when searching for, qualifying and recruiting new employees. In the long run, it’s better to do the work up front and make sure you are hiring the best people, rather than working harder to clean up after the mess that’s left from hiring under performing workers.

Automated Job Approval Done Right

July 28th, 2011
Newton Software continues to find ways to improve their applicant tracking software by adding an Automated Job Approval Process. This new feature falls in line with the rest of Newton’s easy to use, intuitive system. They took nearly a year to make this complex process both flexible and transparent. Taking that time allowed them to make something that worked great, rather than just another feature to add to the list.

Administrators can oversee the approval processes in real-time and address bottlenecks before they become jams. Newton also created this feature to allow users either to simply facilitate their current approval process or to completely start over and create a new automated process. Newton takes another one of the things users do 80% of the time and made it into a feature that works really well.

Approval Dashboard

Check Out Newton’s Blog Announcing The New Feature.

A little background to Job Approval:
Job approval is a process which allows hiring managers and supervisors to request approval for a requisition. The requested job is then put through either a paper or email process before it is activated, and only then will the company begin to look for applicants.

Companies use job approval for a variety of reasons. It ensures that a consistent process is implemented every time a position is opened. It gives human resource teams the control to complete the appropriate audits before resourcing the recruiting process. Finally, the approval process provides recruiters the ability to see what requisitions are coming up in their recruiting process.

How to Hire a Great Recruiter

July 21st, 2011

During a presentation for a prospective customer a question came up: how can we hire a great recruiter? This is something that I’ve been thinking about for nearly 15 years. I’ve been a recruiter. I’ve hired and trained dozens of recruiters, both corporate and agency. Today, my company builds applicant tracking software for corporate recruiters. Recruiting is a incredibly popular profession and everyone has their own opinion on what makes a great recruiter, most of which I tend to agree with. Over the years, I’ve developed my own formula for what makes a great recruiter. Since the economy is showing signs of improvement and more people are hiring recruiters again, I’ve decide to share my thoughts on what makes a great recruiter.

My method was cemented 10 years ago when running a high-end, technical recruiting agency in Silicon Valley. I wanted to hire people based on the potential as opposed to their actual experience. I knew I could teach a talented, motivated person to be a recruiter and I was tired of guessing if people were actually going to be successful. So, I enlisted the help of an industrial psychologist to develop a methodology for choosing recruiters with the most probability for success. First, we had to figure what specific qualities to look for. This ended up being one of the most enlightening processes of my career. The psychologist’s team ran a series of tests to refine the characteristics that made top performers tick. We learned that in a fast-paced, high volume, technical environment self-confidence, flexibility and the ability to stay focused were the top three traits that our best recruiters had in common.

Working with the psychologist proved priceless.  Together, we developed a schedule for our interview teams to follow and each person on the team knew their role. We created interview score cards and outlined behavioral interview questions to each of the traits making our roundtable sessions efficient and decisive. In just weeks we improved our interviewing techniques and as a result began hiring people that stayed longer and produced more.

The system and the science worked. I still firmly believe that self-confidence, flexibility, and focus are the top quantifiable traits that best forecast the potential success of a professional recruiter. But there’s something that has continued to bother me, something that makes a great recruiter that I’m not sure you can learn or even test. I’ve been trying to put this into words, and during this meeting it came to me.

The best recruiters I’ve worked with can identify with with the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of their contacts.  They have the ability to recognize, review, and manage their own emotions and use this information to guide their actions. Top performers develop a finely tuned analytical engine that’s continuously processing information to find an optimal solution. Finally, they have the ability to identify and control their emotions and solve problems without being overwhelmed with massive amounts of information.

Hiring a great recruiter is as important as ever. As the economy continues to grow, talent will become harder to attract and hire. Hiring a recruiter for their connections or because they have been a recruiter for decades should come second to looking for the candidate with the right traits. A great recruiter will have the self-confidence to become productive almost immediately, the flexibility to be successful in a changing environment, and the ability to focus on getting the job done at all costs. While it may be difficult to determine whether or not a recruiter will ultimately have the mind set to improve their performance, it is well within reason to assume that you can determine whether they are empathetic and have a fair amount of self control. Remember, great people attract great people. You have every reason to take the time to hire a great recruiter.

The best new recruiting blog

August 27th, 2010

Ok, it’s not HiringSciences.com.  I’ve been lazy with this blog with a capital L.  I guess I shouldn’t be that hard on myself, I write and maintain 2 blogs for an applicant tracking software company and a food blog (I’m reluctant to share this for some reason).

Anyways, check out GravityPeople’s blog. It’s the best new recruiting blog going.  There’s lots of relevant content about the industry plenty and of advice about interviewing and attracting talent.  In a blogsphere full of lame, self promotional drivel, GravityPeople’s blog is a refreshing change and a valuable resource.

gravityLogo2010

About GravityPeople
GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for over decade.  Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.

About GravityPeople

GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for over decade.  Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.