3 Tips If Your Hiring Strategy Isn’t Working
Though the hiring pace seems to be slowing a bit, many organizations still have significant gaps in their employee rosters. These gaps are addressed day to day by work either being de-prioritized or, more often, current employees covering the workload, often leading to frustration and burnout. Closing open roles is key to productivity, business performance, and employee morale.
Here are the first three things I would do if you’re roles are not being filled in your preferred timeline:
1. Review the role specifications.
Too often, recruiting profiles read like they are a legalistic job description, covering everything someone might possibly do and requiring a level of expertise that is rare to find. This approach is not likely to attract discerning job seekers.
Your job posting should read more like a marketing document – attracting the type of person you want to be in your organization. Does your job profile focus too much on education and years of general experience and not enough on the behaviors and skills you want people to have demonstrated? In today’s world, it’s more critical than ever to understand what it will take to be successful in a role and your organization. Those are the topics you want to probe, not if someone earned a degree 15 years ago.
If you’re hiring for an entry-level position, you still re-evaluate if a degree is required to be successful in the job. In many cases, it’s not. It's likely more important that they have had specific coursework or experience doing something similar/adjacent to your role.
To read more of the research on this topic, check out this McKinsey article focused on taking a skills-based approach to build your future workforce.
2. Review the package you plan to offer
The market for top talent continues to be competitive, so you need to be clear on why someone would want to be part of your organization – what they will receive if they join. With rising inflation, pay is becoming a critical factor, as outlined in this recent Josh Bersin article, The Growing Role of Pay in Employee Experience and Business Performance. “While opportunity to grow and a sense of belonging remain top drivers of engagement, among these 4500+ workers, pay now matters more.”
However, you can’t just rely on the salary to attract the people you want in your organization. People often look at the additional compensation factors (bonus and equity) but also around your culture. Questions candidates are likely to ask include:
How has your organization supported employees during the past 2+ years?
What adjustments have you made in your organization around flexible work arrangements – where, when, and how people work?
What programs and practices do you have in place to support employees?
How are the organization’s values demonstrated throughout the organization?
What is the organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging and how is this commitment coming to life?
3. Consider your internal talent pool
Too often, the first instinct when a role is vacated or a new role is added is to open a position in the external marketplace. Why do we often assume that no one internally could perform the role? Yes, in some cases, we want a new perspective, but often, it’s because we don’t realize the full depth of experiences that are employees may have, particularly if they joined the organization with prior experience. We also often don’t consider the option of training someone to take the position, believing it will take too long. I’d challenge leaders to ask whether internal knowledge capital is more valuable than some years of specific external experience. Hiring from the outside is time-intensive, costly, and doesn’t demonstrate an internal commitment to growing your people. To commit to internal talent mobility, three things are key:
making new opportunities easily visible to all employees so they can raise their hands,
willingness of managers to support internal movement though it may make things challenging in the short-term, and
manager awareness of their team member’s interests and capabilities.
One thing we know is true. Employees leave organizations when they don’t see opportunities to grow. What opportunities and visibility to the opportunities are you providing?
These suggestions are not silver bullets to closing your open roles, but they are steps to consider. If it’s time to review your people strategy related to your talent supply chain, you can use this link to schedule a time to discuss where your team or organization is.